Ava | Rotten Tomatoes

Mar 08, 2021

"Yours is not to reason why, yours is to do or die." How Tate Taylor went from The Help & Get On Up to this and The Girl on the Train is beyond me. At least MA was a weird ass digression. I mean, having some of this insanely amateur camera work cover a subject as familiar and refined as Jessica Chastain is not only off-putting, but amplifies the clumsy and incompetent aspects of the filmmaking. All bad things aside, there is a legitimately solid moment of tension between John Malkovich and Colin Farrell's characters (yeah, the movie has a damn cast) that leads to one of the few tactile fight sequences the movie otherwise throws out like scraps to a pig, but at the same time this thing is mostly a hard-boiled genre flick with a pinch of a Hallmark homecoming movie thrown in and...surprise! The two don't mix well. We do get the origin story in the opening credits as opposed to being told we've finally arrived at who Ava was always meant to be just before the end credits roll, but we still get the set-up for a sequel that will never happen in which Diana Silvers would seek revenge and likely die at the hands of our titular heroine. There is a kernel of an idea here for an anthology series about how there's always a bigger fish and how fulfillment of a self-prophecy doesn't lead to any further happiness in life, but even that would come down to rote, mediocre genre junk and I just couldn't care any less about these characters. P.S. The Porta Potty bit is a nice little touch, but don't you think having someone sit outside kind of undoes the point?

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