Frida goes postal…
Directed by: Joe Lynch
Written by: Yale Hannon, Joe Lynch
Starring: Salma Hayek, Laura Cepeda, Hiroyuki Watanabe, Akie Kotabe, Togo Igawa
The H-Bomb: After being held captive as a sex slave for over four years, Everly (Salma Hayek) finally musters the courage to inform on Taiko (Hiroyuki Watanabe), the fearsome Yakuza boss who’s kept her prisoner the entire time. When Taiko finds out about her “betrayal,” he is understandably peeved, and puts a bounty on her pretty little head, a bounty big enough to bring all sorts of homicidal cretins out of the woodwork; Yakuza thugs, hookers, dirty cops, attack dogs, and an elderly assassin known as The Sadist (Togo Igawa).
With waves of would be killers invading in droves, Everly is forced to hole up in her apartment in order to fend them off. Fortunately for her, she has a vast collection of firearms, small and large, strategically stashed in such easy to reach places as her oven and her toilet. Unfortunately for her, her mother and small daughter, neither of whom she’s seen in four years, are on their way over. Now Everly not only has to try and survive the night herself, but also protect her estranged family as World War III plays out in her living room.
When I finished watching Everly, I looked up a few reviews online, and for me, it was obvious which ones were written by snotty, pretentious, critique-de-cinema types who just can’t grasp the concept of a B-movie to save their highfalutin lives. If you’re looking for things like a complex story, multifaceted characters, or any kind of intellectual or emotional depth… then fuck-a-duck are you looking in the wrong place. Go watch The Imitation Game. Everly is cinematic junk food. Unabashedly gruesome, shamelessly over-the-top, and overall pretty fucking awesome.
Going into Everly, I wasn’t expecting an Oscar contender, I was expecting a carnival of fucking carnage, and that’s exactly what I got, blessed be. Sure, there is a lot I could attack it for. When one really takes a good, hard look at the plot, cracks and holes start to appear: How did Everly get all these weapons that she has stashed away? How did she get so good at using all these weapons she has stashed away? And since she is so good with all these weapons, why is she only just now trying to escape her life as a sex slave?
But seriously, fuck those questions. Trying to apply logic to a script as intentionally ridiculous as this one is missing the point completely. Everly is pure, bloody escapism. Trashy with a capital Tit, and I mean that in a good way. The barrage of insane gun battles and grizzly knife fights is like something out of a John Woo wet dream, with bullets and blood and bodies flying off in every conceivable direction. The hyper-violence is so outrageous and stylized, the movie’s mantra might as well be, “Reality can go fuck itself.”
I could make the obvious comparisons between this and Kill Bill, or The Raid: Redemption, as the similarities are indeed quite apparent. It may not be as ambitious or accomplished as those epic bloodbaths, and the action may not be quite as inventive, still, given the rather modest budget director Joe Lynch (Wrong Turn 2) is working with, he manages to pull off some pretty slick set pieces, and get a hefty bang for his buck.
Keeping the action contained mostly to Everly’s spacious flat, Lynch himself has likened the film to Die Hard in an apartment. That, too, is a perfectly apt comparison to make, as our heroine is constantly having grenades tossed at her, and rocket launchers fired in her general direction, with her improbably escaping death each and every time. She even takes a bullet early in the show, and is still able to run and flip and duck like it ain’t no thing. All the while her white dress gets progressively dirtier and bloodier as the flick wears on, much like John McClane’s wife-beater.
Salma Hayek’s pint sized frame might not scream action star, though she showed potential in the Desperado movies. Once Upon a Time in Mexico should have been a prime showcase for her, but Robert Rodriguez made the inexplicable decision to kill her character early on, and only have her appear in a few fleeting flashbacks. In Everly, she takes center stage, and gets to demonstrate her ass kicking skills in all their deadly glory. She sells it, too, and is clearly having fun. However, she is a terrific actress, first and foremost, and the script does give her some strong dramatic moments with her mother and daughter, in which she shows a more human side to her character, and she delivers on that front, as well.
At a tight 92 minutes, Everly is a briskly paced slaughter fest of a flick that barely stops for a breather. As a film, it hardly breaks any new ground, and those unwilling to turn off their brains for an hour and a half will constantly be shouting, “Oh, come on!” at their flat screens. Those, however, with a taste, and the stomach, for blood thirsty, bad-ass exploitation flicks, will get a real sick kick out of it.
