Hey, it's an 80's ninja movie! These things are awesome. I've got American Ninja, Ninja Terminator, and a DVD box set of the 1960's series 'The Samurai', where Shintaro had to kick ninja arse every episode with his wits and katanas.

There's a bit of a genre shift between the Elektra and Daredevil movies. Daredevil was about street justice in the rough part of town. Now it's all ninjas from here.

Since her last appearance in the Daredevil movie, Elektra has been conveniently resurrected by Master 'Stick' who trains a secret ninja clan and also plays a mean game of billiards. He's not Japanese, but he's still pretty cool, since he's being played by General Zod. Since Stick kicked Elektra out of his ninja group for not 'getting it', she's been spending her time assassinating people for dosh and having existential crises . One of Elektra's favourite past times is doing flashbacks and montage scenes. She even got a montage scene when she was unpacking her bathroom bag! Elektra and Stick's main enemy is the 'Hand', a group of ninja assassins who turn into puffs of green smoke when they die. The Hand speaks English when they meet up in their secret base, but that's a stable of the 80's ninja genre, and it's nice to see the director paying homage to these tropes.

Anyway, after an opening scene which establishes how bad-arse Elektra is, she gets another assassination contract on a posh island hideaway. As Elektra waits around for her orders, she meets up with slightly irritating teenager and her father. The father character is pretty good looking, in a soulful brown eyes and stubbly kind of way, but sort of boring. Although things sizzle a bit when they meet, I was thinking that Elektra could do much better.

Anyway, it turns out that Elektra is supposed to kill them, but she can't bring herself to do it, and ends up protecting the father and daughter from ninja assassins instead. Back at the Hand HQ, leader of the hand sends out his son to deal with Elektra, since the standard ninjas weren't cutting it. This is when Kirigi and his posse come in. Kirigi fights with a daisho and can make sheets billow around in artsy ways. I thought he was a lot hotter than the father character, and I'm sure he and Elektra could have had a unique and interesting relationship, if only they could have resolved their personal issues.

Other characters in the posse include a guy who can animate his tattoos into CGI animals, a woman with 'withering' powers, a BA-type, and some other dude I didn't get learn what his powers were, since Elektra takes him down rather early. He may have had a practical power like instantly being able to bake pies or parallel park, which would have been cool on a daily basis in the ninja assassin lifestyle, but didn't much help against Elektra.

Anyway, Elektra fights the posse of baddies, flashbacks until reaches the source of her existential crisis, gains more wisdom from Master Stick and bonds with the father and daughter (who have a secret!).

All the performances were pretty good. It even had Shang Tsung from the Mortal Kombat movie as the leader of the Hand who spends a lot of time fiddling with his prayer beads (which probably are his ninja fighting weapon, only we didn't get a chance to see this unfortunately).

The fight scenes would have benefited from a bit of wire-fu, instead it's like video game combat with a few special moves. Kirigi has this 'rush' attack, which is probably done by doing Left+Square on the controller. At the end of the movie, I was thinking that maybe the sequel could resolve around Kirigi and haunted video tapes.

The film had lots of bonding moments, punctuated by ninja assaults. I enjoyed it and would recommend it to 80's ninja buffs.