input: In any number of films, you can find Nicholas Cage as a strong, silent hero, Dennis Hopper as a homicidal maniac, Lara Flynn Boyle as a vamp/tramp, and the late, lamented J.T. Walsh as the heavy. These are the types of roles these four can play in their sleep, and they have done so often enough that to see them playing them again borders on cliche. What a relief, therefore, that John Dahl, a master at getting a lot of mood out of a little action, directed this nuanced noirish thriller. Hopper manages to keep from going over the top, Cage shows a little more depth than his usually-superficial action heroes, Boyle is by turns sultry, innocent, and scheming, and one gets a sense of the hard iron of the soul that is central to his character, Wayne. Dahl's direction gives a sense of the emptiness of the Big Sky country where the story takes place while also being intimate enough to show how a wrinkled brow can indicate a radical change of plot in store. The plot twists are top-notch, and one of the other great twists in this movie is that some of the supporting characters actually act as if they have brains. It isn't often that minor characters like deputy sheriffs have more brains than their headlining superiors. But with a director as smart as Dahl, you shouldn't be surprised by the intelligence of anything connected with this film. An excellent movie.

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pos/neg ans: positive

input: This is absurd - aside from the fellow Australian who has reviewed this flick, I can't help but think that everyone else who has submitted a review so far was some way involved in the production of Elektra, considering how generous they were with their praise.

Admittedly I'm not really a fan of comic-book-to-movie conversions so I didn't go in with many expectations, yet still I found Elektra to be incredibly underwhelming. The thing that irked me the most was the fact that there was SO MUCH in this film which went by unexplained, that left you thinking "huh, what relevance does that have to the plot?" or "so how did that aspect of the character come about?" I can only hope that these are things which are perhaps explained somewhat in Daredevil, which I have no intention of seeing.

Furthermore, the behaviour of the characters in this film appear to do an about-face at random moments to suit the storyline, and don't even get me started about the utterly pointless romantic sub-plot. I'm also (still) scratching my head over the fate of Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa's character, which seems to have gone by unexplained.

If I can give kudos to this movie for anything it would have to be the fantastic locations in which it was shot, but otherwise I gained little enjoyment from Elektra. I know we're supposed to suspend our disbelief for fantasy/action films, but almost everything in this film was so improbable or confusing (even by action film standards) that it simply frustrated me.

Well, hell, at least Jennifer Garner looks damn good.

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pos/neg ans: negative

input: I rented this one on DVD without any prior knowledge. I was suspicious seeing Michael Madsen appearing in a movie I have never heard of, but it was a freebie, so why not check it out.

Well my guess is that Mr. Blonde would very much like to forget he's ever taken part in such a shame of a film.

Apparently, if your script and dialogs are terrible, even good actors cannot save the day. Not to mention the amateur actors that flood this film. Too many non-native-English-speakers play parts of native-English-speakers, reading out lines from a script that should have been thrown away and not having been made into a movie. It's unbelievable how unbelievable all the lines in the movie sound. The music is awful and totally out of place, and the whole thing looks and sounds like a poor school play.

I recommend you watch it just so you would appreciate other, better, movies. This is why I gave it a 3 instead of the 1 it deserves.

Is the sentiment of this review positive or negative?

pos/neg ans:
negative