Electra (2005)

Today's movie was decided by my father flipping the tv channel to the one that was playing Electra. I had planned on maybe going to the theater to catch a movie I may have missed when it first came out, but Electra actually gave me an interesting movie to compare to the two films I just saw. Both this and Avalon feature a tough female killer, and both this and Green Lantern are based on comic book characters. Right now there is a lot of mixed messages going around about Green Lantern, and even I wasn't totally satisfied, but Electra has a reputation as a pretty poor film. How bad could it have gotten? Hit the jump to find out!


Electra isn't a very well known character, and she was first introduced in the Daredevil movie (which I also haven't seen) and in some circles this film is considered Daredevil 2. She's basically a ninja dressed in red lingerie with a pair of deadly sai. What's with wearing red and using sai? Seems like a trend. Anyways, she's an assassin for hire and is given a job to eliminate 2 targets. After finding out the targets are good people and also a father and his daughter, she rejects the job, but now feels she must protect them from the next assassins that are sent in her place.

Similar to Green Lantern, there are a lot of facets to the comic book story that they've worked into the movie, although nothing has as much baggage as Green Lantern. In Electra, the enemy assassin group is called The Hand. In the Marvel comic universe, The Hand is a pretty big group that has butted heads with many heroes, including The Avengers and Spider-Man. In this film, however, the significance of The Hand isn't really conveyed. It just seems like they're maybe just an evil corporation or similar to the Yakuza, when in fact in the comics they are far more vast, ancient, established, and malevolent. In the movie it's never explained why their ninjas dissolve in a cloud of green smoke and light or why the later characters have powers. So while at the end of Green Lantern I felt I had a good understanding of that universe, as well as who characters were and what their motives were, I never got that impression from Electra.

I was hoping that at least the action would be entertaining since her weapons imply a lot of hand-to-hand combat. This was not always the case with the super powered characters in the last half of the film. Compared to Avalon, it's not too bad, the special effects for the super powers of the villains are definitely better than the effects in Avalon. But all of that is due to the few years that separate the movies. Even so, the graphics have definitely not aged well for this film either. It's always so surprising how quickly computer graphics age, while practical effects seem to last the test of time much longer. The actual combat scenes had problems too. Why use choreography for the fighting when you can just use tons of quick cuts with a dash of shaky cam?

Who needs a "Three Wolf Moon" shirt when you can do this!

As for the acting, it was decent, not great, but not terrible. I never got that super cheesy vibe from the main characters, although that was a different story from the super powered baddies that show up. They have zero character and almost no lines, they're just there as a reason to have special effects and more people for Electra to kill. One thing is that I think the female lead in Avalon had a better "tough" look to her than Jennifer Garner does, but she still does pretty good for herself.

In the end, Electra ended up leaving me zoned out. I had a hard time caring what was going on because a lot of the action scenes were uninspired and ruined with quick cuts, and the rest of the film was pretty bland and mediocre. It did really open my eyes to how poorly Green Lantern could have ended up though, which is what inspired me to bring it up in this article. Just thinking about it, Green Lantern, with it's massive complex story, could have EASILY ended up FAR worse than even Electra. After sitting through this, I kinda want to go see Hal Jordan fly around again in his green energy suit. But back to Electra, don't bother to ever see this movie. It's not entertaining, and if I had to come up with one word to describe it, I would say it's forgettable. So take my word, and forget this one.