After being killed in Daredevil, Elektra (Garner) is reborn at the hands of martial arts guru Stick (Stamp), who trains her into a prescient fighter. But when she fails to overcome the emotional residue of her troubled childhood, he throws her out of school and she goes to work with McCabe (Cunningham) as an assassin for hire. Then she meets Mark (Visjnic) and his daughter Abby (Prout), and soon they're all on the run from The Hand, an evil group trying to recruit the world's most powerful warriors.

The plot is actually rather intriguing, and it's nice to see a comic book movie that dares to spend so much time establishing and exploring its central character. But the shifts from thriller to psychological drama to romantic comedy to action adventure are uneven, and the film ends up as a series of almost unrelated scenes without gelling into a coherent rhythm.

Garner is fine in the central role--combining tough expertise with inner vulnerability--but her red costume is almost as ridiculously impractical as Halle Berry's Catwoman get-up. It's hard to say whether Stamp is going for minimalist or downright goofy with his camp performance. And the five-person gang of villains (Lee, Malthe, Ackerman, Sapp and Ribeiro) are like escapees from an X-Men movie. Although this isn't surprising considering both are Marvel franchises.

The filmmaking is stylish and inventive enough to keep our attention--well-choreographed fights and eerie flashbacks add energy and emotion, although there's a bit too much battle posing to take anything seriously. As the epic war between good and evil escalates, tiny details begin to niggle (like why the bad guys vanish in a puff of green smoke when they die), and the filmmakers start shamelessly pulling the emotional heartstrings. But by then we've given up trying to figure out what this film is trying to do or say.