Elektra Two Disc Director s Cut Collector s Edition

Product Description FROM THE FORCES THAT BROUGHT YOU X-MEN AND DAREDEVIL -¦Superstar Jennifer Garner proves that looks can kill as the sexiest action hero ever to burst from the pages of Marvel Comics. Restored to life after sustaining mortal wounds in Daredevil, an icy, sol Amazon.com While 2003's Daredevil was a conventional superhero movie, the 2005 spinoff, Elektra, is more of a wuxia-styled martial arts/fantasy flick. Elektra (Jennifer Garner) has returned to her life as a hired assassin, but she balks at an assignment to kill a single father (Goran Visnjic, ER) and his teenage daughter (Kirsten Prout). That makes her the target of the Hand, an organization of murderous ninjas, scheming corporate types, and a band of stylish supervillains seeking to eliminate Elektra and tip the balance of power in the ongoing battle of good vs. evil. As the star of , Garner has proven that she can kick butt with the best of them, and some of the visual effects are impressive, but the action sequences tend to be anticlimactic, and there's not much to the story. Fans will notice numerous references to , but there's very little resemblance to Miller's cold-blooded killer (Elektra with an agent? Elektra referring to herself as a "soccer mom"?). Is Elektra better than Daredevil? Not really, even with the distinct advantage of having all Garner and no Ben Affleck. That could be the spinoff's greatest disappointment: after Spider-Man 2 raised the bar for comic-book movies, Elektra lowered it back to Daredevil's level. Directed by Rob Bowman (the X-Files movie), and featuring Terence Stamp as the mysterious mentor Stick, Will Yun Lee (Die Another Day) as the chief villain, and NFL-player-turned-mixed-martial-arts-champion Bob Sapp as the immovable Stone. --David Horiuchi Additional Features The unrated director's cut of Elektra might be worth the purchase just for the bonus features, specifically a pretty terrific documentary called "Elektra: Incarnations." Almost an hour long, it traces the history of Elektra in the comic books by interviewing Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, Greg Rucka, Brian Michael Bendis, and others, and displaying lots of art, some of it unpublished. There's also a 15-minute featurette on Elektra in Greek mythology, a massive (140 minutes) two-part making-of documentary, and a commentary track in which director Rob Bowman and editor Kevin Stitt discuss Elektra for a while then Bowman's work processes. The three deleted scenes that were included on the theatrical-cut DVD are here, though now with commentary on two of them by Bowman and Stitt (the Ben Affleck cameo scene apparently left them speechless), but there are also four alternate/extended scenes including an interesting opening sequence. The director's cut has a bit more violence and some intriguing flashbacks, but at about three minutes longer than the theatrical cut isn't a substantially different--or substantially better--film. The changes made for the Daredevil director's cut were a much greater improvement. --David Horiuchi