Trashy Female Superhero Movies
Catwoman (2004)
Award-winning actress Halle Berry of X-Men fame plays a revived graphic designer-turned-literal Catwoman who’s … clearly meant to be the supposed DC Comics antihero. Probably in the same way Frankenstein-ing some two to three crosscuts in five seconds flat is supposed to be “fast-paced,” or that handwriting analysis is supposed to predict your personality. It’s almost captivating to watch a movie trip over itself at every opportunity, at every idea—all in service of a “creative vision” that should never be left five feet within a woman nor a pleather catsuit ever again.Caution: I’d be remiss not to issue an epilepsy warning, partly due to the film’s overediting and select scenes of flashing lights.
Fantastic Four (2005)
Given these superheroes’ history of lackluster film adaptions, Tim Story’s was certainly no different. Its characterization-first approach and rather pitch-perfect cast softens the bare-bones plot, allowing a poignant look into othering and disability via the Thing; otherwise, the film struggles to innovate outside just fulfilling an archetypal superhero origins story. Expect a circa-2005 approximation of human interaction, Chris Evans’s most punchable performance known to man, and a whole lot of cheese.
Back in the early 2000s, Hollywood finally decided to give women a shot at starring in a superhero film. Having had my fill of various Superman and Batman incarnations, I eagerly anticipated Elektra, starring Jennifer Garner. At the time, Garner was the up-and-coming star of the popular Alias TV show, playing spy and mistress-of-disguise Sydney Bristow. With biceps even Angela Basset might envy and a flair for elegantly lethal fight choreography, Garner seemed like the perfect person to show that women could headline a blockbuster action franchise.
The problem was, the script they gave her was so bad, my cats would probably balk if I lined their litterbox with it. In fact, I’ve mentally blocked Elektra‘s plot beyond the barest details, and I can’t bring myself to watch again, even for the sake of modeling good journalism. So I’m relying on an IMDB summary to let you know that the film centers on skilled martial artist Elektra Natchios, who was killed in the 2003 film Daredevil but is here resurrected by Stick, her blind martial arts guru. But Elektra can’t let go of her Batman-style anger over witnessing her mother’s murder, so Stick banishes her from training, though she’s been with him long enough to foster an ability to see short glimpses of the future, which give her an edge in combat. She becomes a contract killer, and we rejoin her as she receives a summons from her agent, who directs her to spend a few days on a random island, where the person who is hiring her will eventually reveal her assassination targets. Why the wait? We don’t know. Some time on the beach might be great for Elektra—after all, a girl needs a break from murder-for-hire from time to time. But it’s deathly boring for the audience. What follows is a messy plot involving juvenile pickpockets, astral projection, some dude named Mark, and a group of men with stupid names like “Typhoid” and “Tattoo,” because apparently naming their martial arts master “Stick” wasn’t enough for the screenwriters.
What makes me salty is that between the colossal failure that was the equally ridiculous Catwoman (see Sasha’s review, above) and this giant flop of a film, Hollywood decided that “women can’t headline superhero movies.” No. These two films only proved that even a future Golden Globe- and a future Oscar-winner couldn’t salvage terrible scripts that would have been vastly improved by sending them through a paper shredder and randomly reassembling the pieces. It wouldn’t be until 2018’s record-breaking Wonder Woman that director Patti Jenkins would be able to demonstrate the error in this patriarchal logic, with a film that added the all-important killer script and stunning action sequences to the solid acting.
Sadly, Garner’s career never really recovered. Although she received a People’s Choice Award for favorite action-movie actress for Elektra, she was relegated to playing two-dimensional soccer moms for years after Alias ended its run in 2006. However, Garner is due to embrace her right to bare arms and reprise her role as Elektra in Deadpool & Wolverine, coming out later this year. Here’s hoping these writers give her something better to work with, or at least something we can hate-watch without accidentally slipping into a boredom coma.