Elektra wants to be a dark, moody revenge fantasy. It mostly gets the mood wrong and the revenge wrong too.
Jennifer Garner plays Elektra Natchios, a former student of the blind martial arts master Stick, who was killed and brought back to life. She has spent years as a contract killer, living off the grid and moving from one assignment to the next. That setup sounds like the start of a great story. Instead, the movie spends its runtime doing the barest version of that idea.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
The Setup
Elektra is hired to kill a man named Mark Miller and his young daughter, Abby. The twist is that she falls in love with Mark, spares him, and then has to protect both of them from assassins sent by a crime syndicate called The Hand. That’s the whole plot. It’s a simple reversal, and it should work. It doesn’t.
The problem starts with the pacing. The film moves slowly in the middle, spending far too much time on Elektra’s lonely contract-killing lifestyle before the stakes actually rise. By the time Abby shows up and the real threat emerges, the movie has lost momentum it never fully regains.
The Fight Scenes
The action sequences are the film’s strongest asset, and even they are not enough to carry it. Garner is athletic and committed, and the wirework and choreography occasionally reach a kind of grace. But the fights feel less like battles and more like set pieces, isolated from the story around them.
Kirigi, the son of The Hand’s master Roshi, leads a team of assassins including Typhoid, Stone, Kinkou, Tattoo, and Meizumi. Their attacks are frequent but rarely build toward anything. The film treats the Hand as a threat without giving it much personality beyond being the bad guys who want Abby.
The Romance
The romance between Elektra and Mark is meant to humanize her. It doesn’t. Mark is a single father who loses his wife, and Elektra is drawn to him despite her profession. That could be tender. Here it feels like a plot device rather than a character choice.
The film’s central failure is that Elektra never stops being a contract killer, even after she decides to save Mark and Abby. Her moral arc is flat, and the movie never earns the emotional weight of her decision to protect them. The ending, which sees Elektra fleeing with the pair through a secret exit into a forest, is rushed and anticlimactic.
The Reception
Elektra was a commercial failure. It grossed $57 million against a production budget of $43–65 million. Critics were harsher still, finding the script and storyline wanting while praising Garner’s performance.
Looks CAN kill.
That tagline sums up the problem. The movie is about a woman who kills for a living, but it never really commits to what that means. It’s a superhero film that treats its protagonist as a killing machine and then asks us to care about her as a person. The two things don’t sit together well.
A Timeline of Key Events
| Event | Time |
|---|---|
| Elektra is killed and revived by Stick | Early in the story |
| Elektra is expelled from the training compound | Years before the main story |
| McCabe receives the offer from the anonymous client | Near the start of the film |
| Abby steals her mother’s necklace | Midway through the film |
| Elektra meets Mark Miller | Midway through the film |
| The Hand sends Kirigi to kill Elektra | Late in the film |
| McCabe sacrifices himself to buy Elektra time | Late in the film |
The film’s credits are notable. Zak Penn, Stuart Zicherman, and M. Raven Metzner wrote the screenplay, while Mark Steven Johnson got credit for “motion picture characters” and Frank Miller got credit for “comic book characters.” That split suggests the movie was built from two separate sources, and it shows in the final product.
Elektra is a failure of ambition. It had a great premise — a killer who falls in love and chooses protection over death — and it spent almost its entire runtime avoiding that premise. The result is a film that is watchable in patches but forgettable in total.
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