4. Elektra (2005)
When a fierce warrior survives a near-death experience, she becomes a killer for hire. As in, she was hired to kill the audience. It was bad. That’s what I’m trying to say here.
Elektra was a spin-off from the nearly as bad Daredevil movie (spoiler alert, see the next entry) and gave audiences something they were asking for, and something they weren’t. See, people genuinely liked Jennifer Garner in the Daredevil flick. She was that movies saving grace. So why not spin her off into her own origin story flick in the Marvel universe? That is what audiences didn’t want. The boring, poorly written origin story.
This movie suffered as part of a wave of quickly, “cheaply” made movies to capitalize on the superhero popularity. Daredevil made a little bit of money, and people seemed to be crying for more and more. Elektra suffered because of it. Not a strong enough character (or acting for that matter) to carry an entire flick on its own.
3. Daredevil (2003)
This movie has all the requirements of a bad superhero movie. Toxic Waste. Mid-level actors (at the time, most are huge names now). A character that most of the non-comic-loving audience knows. But it had Ben Affleck. Then again, so did Gigli (which immediately followed Daredevil). I’ll be perfectly honest. This movie gets a ton of hate, gets trashed online, but of the movies I’ve listed so far, it is the most watchable to me. At the end of the day, audiences couldn’t get past the blind guy using sonar and the rain to “see” his enemies.
This is another poorly done origin story. The direction and acting are both poor. Jon Favreau is a cast member in this flick and I have to think that he got a lot of inspiration for what not to do with a superhero origin story here. Affleck turns in a less-than-ok acting performance. On the bright side, he meets his future wife. That has to be worth something to movie goers, right? Wrong. We don’t care about your love story. Affleck.
At the end of the day this is a flick that could have been done so much better. It’s a great Marvel character and it just got muddied in a bad flick. Marvel has recently regained the cinematic rights to Daredevil, so maybe we’ll be seeing him again in the future? It has to be better than this garbage.