Last year, Deadpool & Wolverine surprised comic book fans when it came out and was revealed to be — more than anything else — a eulogy for the 20th Century Fox era of Marvel movies. The film pays homage in ways alternately humorous and sincere to everything from Logan and X2: X-Men United to Blade and 2005’s Fantastic Four, and it even manages to acknowledge the unrealized, Channing Tatum-led Gambit. Tatum, Wesley Snipes, and Chris Evans all make cameos in the Deadpool sequel, as does Jennifer Garner.
The latter actress reprises her role of Elektra in Deadpool & Wolverine, appearing as one of the many Fox-created Marvel variants who was unceremoniously pulled out of her alternate timeline and sent to the Void. Garner’s cameo allows Deadpool & Wolverine to reference not only 2003’s Daredevil, in which she made her big-screen debut as Elektra, but also 2005’s Elektra, a spin-off that proved to be even more disastrous than its predecessor. As it does with every Fox-produced Marvel movie, Deadpool & Wolverine asks viewers to look back at Elektra with a bit of rose-colored, nostalgia-fueled appreciation.
But all it takes is one rewatch of the film to remember that not all movies deserve to be reclaimed. The blockbuster, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month, is still just as much the cringey misfire now as it was when it hit theaters in 2005, and no amount of empty nostalgia can change that.
Elektra’s premise
Picking up years after 2003’s Daredevil, Elektra follows its resurrected heroine as she grows closer to a father (Goran Višnjić) and his young, prodigious daughter (Kirsten Prout), both of whom she’s been hired to kill. When she chooses to spare them, other assassins emerge from the shadows. Garner’s Elektra is consequently forced to protect the two innocents from a team of killers, including a poisonous assassin named Typhoid Mary (Natassia Malthe) and a supernaturally powerful swordsman named Kirigi (Will Yun Lee). If this sounds like a strange story to tell with a character like Elektra, whose merciless nature is what makes her relationship with Matt Murdock so fiery and interesting on the page, then you’ve already landed on one of the many reasons why Elektra just doesn’t work.
The film does little to explore its protagonist’s past, and it fails to meaningfully dig into her out-of-character decision to assume responsibility for two strangers’ safety. 2003’s Daredevil, frankly, does a better job delving into Elektra’s inner rage and fighting, frequently vengeful spirit. That’s saying a lot, given that Daredevil makes the unforgivable mistake of turning Garner’s sai-wielding warrior into first a love interest, then a damsel-in-distress, later an insultingly outmatched vigilante, and ultimately a dead-wife type character for Ben Affleck’s Matt Murdock to avenge. Elektra somehow falls even further short, though, and it completely fails to capture the ferocity and physical power that make its eponymous heroine such a striking comic book figure.
That isn’t the fault of Garner, who tries her best in Elektra to convey a level of strength befitting her character. She is, however, repeatedly undercut by a surface-level script full of clichés, as well as extremely poor editing and camera blocking, both of which render Elektra‘s fight scenes flat and frequently incomprehensible. There are very few sustained wide shots throughout the film. Director Rob Bowman instead constructs Elektra‘s action sequences out of shaky close-ups that often make it hard to tell whether we’ve just seen Elektra roundhouse kick an opponent or slash at him with one of her trademark sai. The film’s fight sequences are only further hampered by visual effects that looked bad and dated in 2005. (Check out the below clip to see all of these issues crammed into a single two-minute confrontation.)
What went wrong?
When it was released, Elektra received overwhelmingly negative reviews and grossed only $57 million at the box office. Over the years, there have been films, including a few superhero and franchise titles, that have underperformed and been received more tepidly than they deserved. But Elektra is not one of them. It isn’t just a bad, poorly made film full of enough painfully shoddy VFX shots to feel like a straight-to-DVD title. It also fails to honor the very comic book character it is named after and doesn’t seem to have any interest in exploring her or figuring out why so many readers fell in love with her in the first place.
It’s a superhero movie that should be forgotten, and that just makes Deadpool & Wolverine‘s desire to cash in on whatever fond memories people might have of Elektra, as well as its attempts to redeem the film’s reputation, all the more frustrating and confounding. Nostalgia can be a powerful tool in a film, one that must be wielded more considerately than Deadpool & Wolverine does. The least we can ask a superhero movie like it to do is not expect us to ignore the quality of the things it wants us to look back on. It nonetheless does just that with Elektra, a film that is in no way deserving of the decades-later reclamation that Deadpool & Wolverine tried to give it last year in the name of nostalgia alone.
Elektra is streaming now on Max.