Starring: Jennifer Garner, Terrance Stamp, Gorjan Visjnic
Director: Rob Bowman

I’’m pretty sure I’’m the only one in the world who thought the Ben Affleck superhero outing DAREDEVIL was a great film, not just as a comic book adaptation, but also as an action movie. And along those lines, I’’m pretty sure I’’m the only one who’’ll think that ELEKTRA is a pretty good little excursion as well.

Don’’t get me wrong—it absolutely reeks of straight-to-video cheesiness and it’s obvious that they had to make the story up as they went along, but it’’s this cheap-***censored*** charm that also makes it so endearing, exciting and well, I’’ll do anything to watch Jennifer Garner on the screen for two hours.

Starting up where Elektra’’s story in DAREDEVIL ended (stabbed and left for dead by DD baddie Bullseye), Elektra (the stunningly hot Garner) has been resurrected by a mysterious ninja sect led by Stick (no relation to the Burt Reynolds character, sadly) who looks like General Zod with a gift certificate to LL Bean. He uses his crazy healing powers (actually a ploy to rub on the unconscious Elektra’s chest and stomach, so who can blame him?) to bring her back to life.
So far, so good.

After being expelled from the sect, she realizes that she has no marketable job skills save for her undetectable killing style. Yes, she can type 140 words per minute, but she doesn’t really know how to use Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint, so instead of taking a class at the community college, she uses her sais to stab people in the neck. Sure, it pays well, but the lack of proper medical insurance really makes things inconvenient especially when her ninja star throwing arm starts flaring up.

Her latest hit is to be a young girl and her dad, but, totally against character, she ends up befriending them and protecting them from a rival ninja clan called the Hand, which seems to have most of the cast of Surf Ninjas on it’s payroll. They want the young girl dead because she is actually a “treasure”—. No, not a precious angel who makes her parents proud, but, the stereotypical “chosen one”, who will end the war between the rival ninjas once and for all.

Yes, the plot is minimal, but in it there are little scraps of brilliance, especially when it comes to the villains trying to kill Elektra and the Treasure (that sounds like a good name for a Sid and Marty Krofft show!). They include Stone, a hulk whose skin is rock hard, (like Stone! Get it?); Tattoo, who can make animals appear from his skin (they’re his Tattoos! Get it?); the fan fave Typhoid Mary (much hotter here than in the comic) who causes everything in her path to atrophy and die with merely her touch or breath and Kinko. (I had a really funny joke about the copy shop to go with this, but dammit——Rod already used it in his review. I need to be quicker with these things.)

It all leads to a very clichéd final battle in a haunted mansion with lots of free flowing linen just blowing around, but I’ll be damned if ninja-loads of mindless fun wasn’t had along the way.

Jennifer Garner is——well, we all know what I think of her. Terence Stamp is always a welcome. My only real casting problem is with the dad and the girl. The indecipherably monikered Grrvijan Vishvinisck is the perpetually bestubbled dad who, I guess kind of likes his daughter, but judging from the lack of chemistry between him and her (or anything on the screen for that matter), I’m not sure. The girl who is the “Treasure” is very annoying and I think she may have accidentally wandered over from the set of Racing Stripes.

As far as comic adaptations go, don’t enter the theater looking for a SPIDER-MAN 2 (or even BLADE 3, for that matter) and you’’ll do just fine. But, if you go in thinking THE PUNISHER was actually pretty good, then good lord you’ll be entertained to no end.

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Louis Fowler is a frequent contributor to Cinema Eye and Hitch Magazine. He is the host of DAMAGED Hearing, Fridays at midnight on KRFC-FM and film critic for the Rocky Mountain Bullhorn. Oh yeah, he also has a blog!