reVIEW (33)
ELEKTRA

Since my review for Suspect Zero went up here at the Iguana because it was co-written by Zak Penn, I figured this one should go up too, since it was also written by Penn. (Boy, it’s a good thing I enjoyed Incident at Loch Ness, or Penn might think I’ve got it in for him…)

Marvel really does know how to shoot itself in the foot.
For all their initiative in translating their superhero properties onto the big screen in the past few years—leaving DC far behind in the dust—it’s really only been Bryan Singer’s X2, Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-man, that have passed muster. All their other movies have run the gamut from, a) better-than-good-but-not-great (X-Men), to b) disappointing (Ang Lee’s The Hulk), to c) just plain awful (Mark Steven Johnson‘s Daredevil).
Rob Bowman’s Elektra though, has the distinction of being the first of Marvel’s recent screen adaptations that is downright boring. And if it’s one thing a comic book film shouldn’t be, it’s boring. The four-color world of comics is frenetic and stylized, charged with adrenaline, and, in the case of red-clad assassin Elektra, a fair amount of pubescent hormones. Unfortunately, none of that is carried over to Bowman’s film.

Picking up some years after the events in Daredevil, Elektra begins with some voice-over back story by Terence Stamp’s Stick, before segueing into a standard sequence which is supposed to establish how formidable our heroine is. Her existence is now considered an urban legend, since she died, after all, in Daredevil. Now an assassin-for-hire, it isn’t long before she gets embroiled in the affairs of The Hand, an evil order of ninja—we know they are evil because when their minions die, they dissolve into billowing yellow smoke—with sinister designs on “The Treasure,” a warrior pivotal to the battle between light and dark.
What follows is a film that is not so much predictable as it is blandly unsurprising. Revelations are made in the course of the story that do absolutely nothing to raise the tepid sense of detached observation which quickly sets in while watching Jennifer Garner alternate between agonizing over the loss of her mother at an early age, and kicking Hand butt.
Sadly, not even the action sequences do much to alter the tenor of Elektra. Uniformly unimpressive—despite one that has a neat set-up with a multitude of floating white sheets—the fight scenes are even more inept than another recent Marvel entry, Blade: Trinity’s, and those were already nearly dispensable. Even the showdown with the quartet of enemy warriors—who we know are formidable and merciless because their grand entrance is done in slow-motion—are horribly inconsequential, as is Elektra’s face-off with main baddie, Kirigi (Will Yun Lee; Colonel Moon from Die Another Day). More’s the pity, considering Kirigi’s (again) none-too-surprising significance to Elektra’s life.

Zak Penn‘s script, in attempting to give us a human protagonist with a past filled with pain and emotion, ends up delivering a story totally devoid of action and tension, dealing, as it does, with story elements we’ve all seen before: the supposedly stone-cold killer with a good heart; the contract that isn’t what it seems; the targets that cause the killer to be conflicted, etcetera, ad nauseum.
Nowhere in the film’s running time do we actually feel a threat, a sense of danger. At no single point do we feel that life is a precious thing. After all, those of Elektra’s order can raise the dead, as they did with her. With that sort of power in your corner, why bother to worry?

Rob Bowman, meanwhile, elevates Elektra not a whit beyond its tension-free beginnings. An X-Files directorial alumnus, Bowman then went on to helm the X-Files feature film, as well as Reign of Fire. Other than a phantasmagoric kiss in a forest, and one of Elektra’s flashbacks involving an apparent demon, nothing in the film is indicative of any sort of directorial flair. Like the X-Files movie, Elektra is straight-forward and by-the-numbers, leaving no residue at all, no lingering feeling of “What did I just see?”, of the revelatory wonder that cinema is capable of.
Perhaps if the director were more versed in the very specific sort of world Elektra’s story is set in, then things would have turned out differently. This is a world steeped in martial arts and mysticism, the world of the Hong Kong martial arts genre, or, to be truer to Elektra’s comic book roots, the world of Japanese manga and anime.

Now, lest I be accused of racism, let me reiterate: Elektra needed a director versed in the genre. Quentin Tarantino understood it well in the Kill Bill saga, as did Guillermo del Toro in Blade II, and the Wachowskis in The Matrix, and none of them are Asian. Inappropriately, Bowman seems to have approached the material as if it were a normal action film with a touch of the supernatural thrown into the mix. Elektra needed to be soaked in a certain atmosphere, to have a specific sensibility. Instead, it languishes in a flavorless stock of mundane proportion.
Not even the presence of charismatic Terence Stamp—who has done everything in his career from facing down the Man of Steel in Superman II, to prancing around the Australian outback in drag in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert—manages to make a dent in the terribly pedestrian armor Elektra is wrapped in.

In the end, where Elektra is concerned, I think this was the biggest surprise: spinning off from the awful Daredevil, I thought it would either be better, or worse, with the greater possibility of being better, as Daredevil was already pretty bad
I just never expected Elektra to be a big, stupefying bore.

(Elektra OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above is a slightly altered version of a previously published review entitled “Marvelous Bore.”)

AFTERTHOUGHTS (6)

6.1 Congratulations to Hayden Panettierre, who graduated high school at the tail end of shooting for Heroes’ first season. So there was a special graduation ceremony during the Heroes’ wrap party, with series creator Tim Kring presenting Hayden with a diploma from Heroes High.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. Hayden is hands down one of the best of the Heroes ensemble, no mean feat, that, and she’s not even at the legal drinking age!

6.2 Well, it’s a pleasant surprise, I’ll say that much.
I’m referring to the announcement (at variety.com) that Lost will run for 3 more seasons, then wrap in 2010. What, with all the doomsayer talk of plunging ratings, a part of me was psyching itself out for the possibility that Lost would take its bow at the end of season 4 (or at least till it hit its 100th episode, as I recall one of the key creators once pointed that out as a nice round number to aim for as the show’s end).
According to the deal struck between Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse, and the ABC bigwigs, there will be 3 more, shortened seasons (16 episodes each), to be aired without repeats (as per 24). That makes 48 episodes, plus the final 4 for this season, so we’ve got 52 more episodes to go, people.
That’ll be a grand total of 119 episodes, nearly an entire season over the 100 mark. Brilliant.

6.3 Returning to Heroes, in case you guys didn’t know, Alex Maleev did the art for the paintings Sylar made after absorbing poor Isaac’s power. Like Tim Sale (who is the artist responsible for Isaac’s paintings and 9th Wonders art), Maleev is a comic book artist perhaps most widely known for a critically-acclaimed run on Daredevil.

(Image courtesy of comicbookresources.com.)

GHOST RIDER (Review)

Here’s a mind-boggling mystery that puts Easter Island and the Marie Celeste to shame: how the Hollywood money people could put Mark Steven Johnson in charge of another superhero film after the dreadful Daredevil.
Didn’t any of them watch that? And for that matter, didn’t Nicolas Cage?
Well, if they did and they still went happily along towards their grim fate which was Ghost Rider, then they deserve whatever may befall them, particularly bad reviews.

After a perfunctory voice over by Sam Elliott (who plays the mysterious Caretaker), we are introduced to the young Johnny Blaze (Matt Long, from TV’s Jack & Bobby), a stunt cyclist working with his father (Brett Cullen), and making googly eyes at Roxanne Simpson (Raquel Alessi).
Johnny’s plans to run away with Roxanne are curtailed when the young man discovers his father has cancer, and makes a deal with Mephistopheles (Peter Fonda): Johnny’s soul for the eradication of the cancer.
Well, M being who he is, takes away the cancer, but still screws Johnny big time, so the poor schmuck is forced to make the painful choice of staying away from Roxanne. Of course, given how these things go, he doesn’t bother to explain himself, just rides away on his motorcycle, leaving Roxanne drenched in the oh-so-dramatic pouring rain. Cad.
Years later, after Johnny has morphed into Nicolas Cage, M and Roxanne (now Eva Mendes doing her best impression of a TV reporter) both come back into his life simultaneously, while M’s son, Blackheart (Wes Bentley) is off to usurp the throne of King of the World from James Cameron.

Now, as the flaming-skull-headed Ghost Rider, Johnny has what is called “the Penance Stare,” where looking into the gaping holes where his eyes should be makes you experience all the pain your evil deeds have caused in the world, leaving you a blank-eyed husk, presumably feeling nothing at all.
One of the biggest problems I had with Ghost Rider was the fact that watching it was like being in a post-Penance Stare stupor. Nothing I saw on the screen engaged me enough to make me feel anything beyond a vague annoyance and a dim impatience to finally see the end credits start to roll.

To begin with, I am asked to accept as the protagonist a character whose personality tics (the Carpenters music, the jellybeans) are so annoyingly contrived, as to turn the character into more of a caricature than he already is. The melodramatic finger-pointing and comedic faces-in-the-mirror just make things all the worse.
On top of that, I am then asked to accept as the protagonist’s love interest, a complete cipher. This is just too much…
Given that the romance takes a sizeable chunk of screen time, I feel I should be able to see exactly why Johnny loves Roxanne, right? To get me invested. To make me see why Johnny is so torn up by the situation. To make me see why he cares so much for her. But all Roxanne is is a pretty-looking vacuum, true believers! She isn’t a character, she’s a walking plot complication.
Actually, come to think of it, I don’t see what Roxanne sees in Johnny either. (Unless of course, you’re the kind of girl who falls for the Nicolas Cage type, which is what you get here, basically. A flaming-skull-headed Nicolas Cage, decked out in spiked leather and chains.)

This is painful, people.
Seeing Peter Fonda in this kind of a movie isn’t all that surprising, really, but to see Wes Bentley here is a massive disappointment. I mean, Ricky Fitts was like a personal god to me, but Bentley is so awful here, it’s almost like it was some other actor who starred in American Beauty. Whattup, Wes?
Sam Elliott, of course, can do the cowboy archetype in his sleep, so he’s fine here, if sorely underutilized. (The final act the Caretaker does for Johnny is so irritating, you’d think twice about the character’s level of intelligence.)
Donal Logue meanwhile, has the thankless task of being the sidekick/semi-comedy relief, and is another sketched-in blur passing off as a character, who is given little more to do than try to talk Johnny out of doing the dangerous jumps, and interrupt his viewing of a martial arts monkey.

Now, if it seems I’m ripping into the actors, that isn’t entirely the case. I mean, who can blame them if the script they’re acting out is a turkey? (Well, maybe we can blame their agents, for getting them this gig…)
Johnson the director isn’t the only one with blood on his hands. The scriptwriter is one guilty culprit as well, and…
Oh. I see.
Johnson wrote the script too.
Well.

And you know what’s even more horrifying than the movie itself? Three things, actually.
One: Ghost Rider has so far grossed over $83 million dollars, the biggest movie of the year to date. Yet another mind-boggling mystery to add to the list.
Two: With that sort of money, Sony will definitely be thinking “sequel.” Oh, joy.
Three: Johnson is actively developing the Vertigo comic Preacher for HBO. (I think he’s writing the script for the pilot right now.)

Johnson has to be stopped.
Daredevil and Ghost Rider are the sort of comic book movies that make comic book movies look bad. Singer and Nolan and Raimi have fought hard to bring a certain legitimacy to the genre, and directors like Johnson and Tim Story (of Fantastic Four infamy) just piddle over all their hard work.
I don’t want to write off HBO’s Preacher before I see a single frame of it, but man, if it blows, I hope Garth Ennis rips Johnson a new one…

Marvel has to be stopped too.
I mean, they get lucky when it’s a Fantastic Four or a Ghost Rider: a bad movie that still, bizarrely, rakes in the dough.
I never thought I’d say this, but we need more Elektras! More bad Marvel movies that bomb at the box office.
Maybe then Marvel will wise up and take their time to get things right.