EVERLY
Director : Joe Lynch
Cast : Salma Hayek, Edith Cepeda, Togo Igawa, Hiroyuki Watanabe, Masashi Fujimoto, Akie Kotabe, Aisha Ayamah
Genre : Action/Thriller
Run Time : 93 mins
Opens : 26 March 2015
Rating : R21 (Violence)
Despite being touted as “the most wonderful time of
the year”, we all know the holiday season can be unpleasant. Mad rushes at
malls, planning parties, spending time with relatives you’re not that fond of
and so on. Everly’s (Hayek) Christmas is going a lot worse than normal. She is
holed up in an apartment where she has been enslaved as the favourite
prostitute of evil Yakuza kingpin Taiko (Watanabe). Everly is attacked by
Taiko’s men when he finds out she has been secretly working with the police to
bring him down. Over the course of the night, Everly has to endure all manner
of assaults while trying to save her mother Edith (Cepeda) and five-year-old
daughter Maisey (Ayamah) from the bloodthirsty criminals.
With
its lone heroine battling an onslaught of thugs in an apartment complex, Everly
could be billed as The Raid meets Panic Room, but that would be giving it
way too much credit. Director Joe Lynch, who has a background in music videos
and low-budget horror flicks, has put together an especially nasty movie that
audiences are somehow supposed to find entertaining. It’s brutal and grisly,
and there definitely is an audience for that, but it’s also gratuitously
exploitative and artless at every turn. For something that’s meant to be a
bloody, fast-paced thriller, it’s difficult to sit through and feels much
longer than it actually is. There are also numerous plot holes and everyone in
this does dumb things – our heroine does dumb things, the villains do dumb
things and it’s just a miserable experience on the whole. Sure Everly, invite
your mother and young daughter into the Yakuza stronghold. They’ll be safe
there! Sure Sadist (Togo Igawa), drip acid on Everly’s bonds! That won’t help
her escape at all!
Salma
Hayek is an Oscar nominee, but she also has a taste for down and dirty action
flicks – after all, she is an oft-collaborator of Robert Rodríguez. Salma Hayek
as a badass woman fending off hordes of gun-wielding mobsters, as well as her
fellow prostitutes who are after her because of the price on her head, sounds
like a reasonably cool place to start. It’s too bad that Everly flits between
being confident and able to handle herself and ducking and screaming. The
intent is for her to break free from her status as a helpless victim, but that
progression is messy at best. There are plenty of histrionics in the scenes
between Everly and her mother, seeming very soap opera-esque in spite of
Everly’s insistence to her mother that “this is not a telenovela!” It also
seems cheap and wrongheaded to put a young child in jeopardy, placing her in
the midst of a wanton bloodbath.
The villains are all Japanese and portrayed as
stereotypically vicious. It’s just another example of that action movie trope –
fall back on a foreign organised crime group as the baddies. It seems
screenwriter Yale Hannon tries to compensate for this with a mild-mannered
character nicknamed “Dead Man” (Kotabe) who is only doing the vile things he
does out of fear of his boss and who spouts truisms like “a sanctuary sometimes
exists in the eye of the storm.” It just feels so blatantly like a band-aid and
is actually just another stereotype. An extended torture scene featuring the
afore-mentioned Sadist is just nasty and silly rather than being genuinely
frightening. Hiroyuki Watanabe does make for a chilling kingpin, but he only
shows up at the tail end of the film and is saddled with contrived one-liners such
as “you have only gotten so far because I have allowed you to” and “frankly,
death by my sword is an honour you do not deserve.”
It’s
gruesome, dumb and almost nauseating, but we’re sure there’ll be connoisseurs
of shlock out there who’ll just love Everly.
It’s actually insulting to think how engineered this is to cater to the
slobbering genre fanboy, and that the result is just as repulsive as it is. At
the very least, Salma Hayek is better suited to the material than Kate Hudson,
who was originally attached to the part, is.
Summary: Everly is overly gory, overly dumb, overly trashy and
overly tasteless.
RATING: 1.5 out of 5
Stars
Jedd Jong
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