EVERLY
DIRECTOR: Joe Lynch
CAST: Salma Hayek, Hiroyuki Watanabe, Akie Kotabe, Togo Igawa, Masashi Fujimoto and |Laura Cepeda
CLASSIFICATION: 18LV
RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes
RATING: **
The story of a female badass fighting an army of thugs sent by the mobster/lover she’s informing on, Everly is a B movie, in air quotes. It’s less a homage to the kind of grindhouse films celebrated by Quentin Tarantino than it is a slavish aping of Tarantino’s postmodern oeuvre itself. The Pulp Fiction film-maker’s bloody fingerprints are all over this film’s corpse.
But director Joe Lynch is no Tarantino. His title character – a vessel of female empowerment along the lines of the vengeful bride of Kill Bill – is, to put it as charitably as possible, a crock.
Salma Hayek makes for a game but only fitfully entertaining Everly. She’s the kind of character who, in the good old days, used to be known as a gangster’s moll, but who is here referred to as a “whore” – a term that captures, less euphemistically, the transactional nature of her relationship with Taiko (Watanabe), the Japanese criminal she’s been sleeping with and spying on.
Setting the nasty tone for the tale, Everly opens with the sounds of Everly’s off-camera gang rape by Taiko’s goons. Later, when one of those henchmen (Kotabe) – the only one Everly hasn’t killed in the gun battle following her assault – points out that he didn’t join in, Everly responds: “Should I be offended?”
Yuck.
Though meant to be sardonic (I hope), her comment undermines screenwriter Yale Hannon’s message that female power comes from strength, not sex. Equally retrograde are the six sexpot assassins who, one after the other, burst through the door of Everly’s flat in a variety of skimpy costumes before getting killed by the heroine.
Yes, it’s all in good fun. And there’s a certain verve to the way Lynch handles the violence, even if he’s less of a stylist than Tarantino. But the film’s brutality – which includes not only the murder of a dog but also a fetishisation of torture that borders on porn – is so excessive, even if tongue-in-cheek, that it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Late in the film, one of Everly’s tormentors, a man known only as the Sadist (Igawa), shows up with a bloody, half-naked guy in a cage (Fujimoto). The caged guy is introduced as the Masochist. But at that point in the movie, you might be forgiven for thinking that was your role.
The Washington Post
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