Ava Movie Review

Less Atomic Blonde meets Killing Eve, more Anna meets The Rhythm Section

by Casimir Harlow
Movies & TV Shows Review

25

Ava Movie Review

Jessica Chastain slums it in 2020's answer to Luc Besson's Anna, this week's 4K premium rental of choice - mostly because there is nothing else - if you don't want to risk going out to see Tenet.

Perhaps it happens to everybody, or perhaps she thought she was signing up for something like Angelina Jolie's Salt or Charlize Theron's Atomic Blonde - which is possible. Behind the scenes, the production was a bit messy - original writer/director Matthew Newton was somewhat publicly disgraced by some assault allegations, and Chastain (a strong #MeToo advocate) was put under the spotlight for working with him - so this end result, still written by Newton but directed by The Help's Tate Taylor, clearly isn't what was planned, and perhaps wasn't what Chastain had signed on for. Hell, it wasn't even called Ava, with Chastain's character called Eve for the entire shoot, requiring ADR and remarketing to inexplicably change it in post, possibly to avoid comparisons to Killing Eve.

But she probably had an idea that something has gone awry when, in her first scene, she was called upon to do such things as cock her semi-automatic pistol after having already fired a round, for dramatic effect. Even notwithstanding such goofy cliches, it's a clunky, straight-to-video opening to a movie that struggles to ever escape such an inauspicious start, directed with little panache - zooming in and out being the modern answer to slo-mo - with a shocking amount of cheap green screen robbing the credibility of some of the otherwise reasonably engaging action sequences, and a terrible, terrible plot proving the final nail in the all-star coffin.

 

For a 96-minute actioner, Ava is a bloated mess  

Ava is an assassin who likes to ask her often already half dead subjects what they did wrong. When her latest mission goes awry, she suspects a betrayal from within her organisation, but is assured otherwise by her handler. His boss, however, doesn't think she can hack it - having had a history of 'episodes' which ended up pretty messy for everybody involved. To complicate matters, Ava has to deal with an ailing mother, and an ex-fiancee who is now with her sister, and who is a degenerate gambler. Oh and she's an alcoholic. What's this even about again?

Ava
So I have to cock the gun after every shot? Are you sure that's right?

It's not easy to make assassins relatable. You either go the Nikita route, and have them basically coerced into that line of work, or you go the Leon route, and paint them as an enigma, with a vague backstory possibly involving them basically having been born into the life. Ava could argue that it did the latter, using an undue amount of exposition to regale her sordid, tragic, history. But really it's just another rolled up ball of convenient cliches. And what's with the creepy talking to her targets as they're dying business? That doesn't come across as an assassin with a conscience, it just comes across like she's a complete and utter psychopath. And even if they'd retained the original name, this isn't Killing Eve. For that it would need a modicum of dark wit.

Chastain gives it her all, but it's all for nought, and she should really know better. She's not convincing as an alcoholic, an assassin, a psychopath, or a tortured heartbroken lost soul. She's not even that convincing in the frenetically edited fight sequences, although she does have bursts of competent gunplay. If she wanted to do John Wick, she should have got a John Wick director to do this properly, and if she wanted to do a movie about relationship woes and alcohol problems, she should have done that instead - the two make for very clumsy bedfellows.

 

A terrible, terrible plot proving the final nail in the all-star coffin  

Ava doesn't get really better either. It's got one strong - but hardly remarkable - action scene, and a whole lot of low rent DTV-standard action as well, not least in the 'nightclub' scene, which so wants to be Wick it hurts, because it only throws a spotlight on just how lame this film is (for comparison, Dacascos's recent One Night in Bangkok, knows exactly what it is doing and, despite being utterly straight-to-video, does it halfway competently). Indeed, perhaps the only thing memorable about the entire film is seeing a 66 year old John Malkovich get into some surprisingly brutal hand-to-hand fisticuffs. Malkovich chews everything up, and would have been worth watching in his own movie. Geena Davis is wasted. Joan Chen didn't need to return to Hollywood for this. And casting Common does not automatically make it more comparable to John Wick 2. Colin Farrell's highly unmotivated snarling family-man villain? He's in some other movie, possibly having just walked off the set of Ritchie's The Gentlemen, and his character does some painfully inexplicable things here, possibly entirely because the script said so.

For a 96-minute actioner, Ava is a bloated mess too. Ten minutes before it's over and you feel like it's missing a whole act. Like they just ran out of money, so staged a fight and the most pathetic foot chase in the history of cinema, merely to get to the end (for those who don't want to fork out £13.99 to rent it - Rakuten offers some garish version of 4K HDR - the trailer below encompasses the whole movie, right the way through to said finale; you won't need to see the movie after that). Chastain deserves better than this, and it's odd that she embarked upon this project with her eyes open. It's even stranger to think anybody even considered giving this a Theatrical outing. Hell, there are times when Ava makes Anna look halfway competent. You can't get much lower than that.

Scores

Verdict

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4

4
AVForumsSCORE
OUT OF
10

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