Marvel's _Elektra_ has some good things going for it: the art direction and action direction in particular are high caliber. It's the way the characters are handled that drags the movie down. The characters aren't exactly poorly drawn; it's more that they aren't fleshed out enough to be either well or poorly drawn. Garner (for example) does a great job at the beginning of making Elektra interesting--tense, reserved, and afflicted by guilt and neuroses. The problem is that we don't get any closer to the character by the end of the film. It's not even clear what her "superpowers" are supposed to be. She can see 10 seconds into the future, and she's handy with a knife--yet she seems to kill the final enemy, a moves-faster-than-the-wind swordsman (a conceit used a bit too much in this movie), with a lucky random strike (demonstrating her ... indomitable spirit?). Similar things could be said about the other characters, who are left mysterious without rising to the level of being intriguing. Leaden and occasionally hackneyed writing doesn't help ("You speak in riddles, old man.") The other big problem is in the overall setup: there are two sides, both groups of vaguely far-eastern occultists who strive to attain Tao-ish calm and balance in the world. One group is, we are told, good, and the other evil. You can see the problem: how do we tell them apart? Apparently, it suffices that the "good" guys wear white robes and live in a woodsy commune, while the "bad" guys look sort of sinister. It's weak; we need to see some modicum of plausible motivation among these people in order to enter the movie's (admittedly enticing) atmosphere of fantasy.
