When I was in middle school, my
friend Ryan introduced me to a southern tradition of eating grilled cheese
sandwiches with maple syrup. Needless to say, I was a bit skeptical that this
combination could be anything other than disgusting, but after much prodding I
discovered that it was actually pretty delicious. Some of our most tasty foods
come from what might be initially unexpected unions, and the same can be said
of our entertainment. Take Hamilton, for example; rap and American
history? Weird. But it works. Fortune favors the bold, but there are some
combinations that just do not work. Director Tate Taylor and screenwriter
Matthew Newton prove this with Ava, a new Netflix film that
attempts to mix familial drama with assassin action, and what results is a
surprisingly dull slog in which both ingredients end up feeling like pointless
subplots.
The
biggest problem is that both the family stuff and the assassination stuff have
very little to do with one another. Ava, played by the usually great Jessica
Chastain, is an ace killer who gets a target put on her after… asking too many
questions, I guess? She then goes home and has to deal with a cantankerous
mother who never gives me any reason to like her, a bratty sister who never
gives me any reason to like her, and an ex-fiancé who has the personality of a
two-by-four (and who also never gives me any reason to like him). I suppose the
two disparate plots would have been fine on their own if they were done well,
but I can’t really say that they were. The action ranges from bland to
adequate, and I guarantee you that none of it is something that you haven’t
seen a thousand times already in better movies. The drama, on the other hand,
is made up of your typical soap opera-y grievances that have all the
originality of an “entertainment as food” metaphor.
All
of this goes to show that when you have two plots that feel like subplots,
nothing really seems to happen at all. Two-thirds of the way in, things were
still starting to take shape with the assassination angle, and by the end Colin
Farrell (a great actor who really needs to fire his agent at
this point) is fighting Jessica Chastain for some reason, and it feels like the
story hasn’t gone anywhere beyond setting the stage.
“Some
reason,” “I guess…” Maybe I should have just paid more attention, right? The
thing is, I did. In addition to the aforementioned problems that this movie
has, there is also the fact that a lot of the things the characters do just
don’t make any damn sense. Why would Colin Farrell (What’s the point of
learning the character’s name?) himself go after Ava if he is in charge of the
whole shadowy super-secret assassin agency? Why did the assassin sent before
him decide it was a good idea to just try and stab Ava in the middle of a
public park? Why do they think she needs to be taken out anyway? I don’t have
the answers for you, nor do I care to learn them. Just skip this one, yeah?
Ava is
now available on Netflix.
This
review was first published in The Keizertimes on January 15th, 2021. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/
Hindsight: In the original article I accidently wrote “sublots” not once, but twice. Somehow my personal editor (my mom), the editor of the Keizertimes, and myself all missed this. My dad caught it when he read my review in the actual newspaper. The rest of the review is okay. The movie was not.
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