I Watch Films: Elektra
1. It turns out Elektra is a Christmas movie. After her neighbours invite her over for Christmas dinner, she makes the plot-turning decision to NOT murder them*. Everything flows from this.
2. Except it's not a Christmas movie as the rest of the story doesn’t flow from this. Stick threw her out of his (unnamed?) camp for training good ninjas for not being good, and [SPOILERS] puts her in the way of this murder plot in an effort to prove she’s really good.
3. But this isn’t the start of it at all. The girl-neighbour is [SPOILERS] the “treasure”, someone with magic powers that both Stick and The Hand (bad ninjas) want to control. It’s their struggle to control her and her father’s refusal to hand (heh) her over that starts it.
4. Wait a minute though! The attempt to get the “treasure” is escalated by Kirigi, the son of the leader of The Hand, and his bunch of superpowered weirdos. In other words it’s really a power struggle between the brash young generation of ninjas and the old subtle ones and Elektra is just a side character in her own movie.
5. Except it turns out that Elektra was once the "treasure" and Kirigi killed her parents so it all goes back to that and that’s why the final sequence takes place in Elektra’s spooky deserted family home which looks very cool.
6. Basically everyone’s decisions feel under-motivated and a bunch of stuff that we don’t need to know gets explained and some things that might want a bit of expansion don’t. There’s some very cool setpiece shots, some (but not all) good fights and Typhoid** tries to snog Elektra to death, a method I regret to admit I always enjoy.
Watch This: For an overly self-serious superhero ninja film.
Don’t Watch This: Unless you are a superhero film completist.
* The exact opposite decision than might be expected from my experience of Christmas Dinners.
** I heard this as Typhon and was disappointed that she has a much less cool (and slightly less Greek) name.
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