🇵🇱 Steve G 🇵🇸’s review published on Letterboxd:
We need to talk about Jessica Chastain.
I've observed on a couple of reviews, mainly of Molly's Game and Miss Sloane, that Chastain is an actor that seems to feel the need to stack the deck completely in her favour. She likes to take projects that seem, first and foremost, to be designed to make her look as good as possible. Even if it's to the detriment of the rest of the film around her.
I'm willing to accept that may be a harsh assessment. I know she has tons of vocal fans. But having just watched Ava, an excrutiatingly boring endeavour that even I, as a top apologist for action shit, couldn't find any redeeming features in, I just wonder. Has she lost it or was she really that good in the first place?
Because here's a film that doesn't just exist to make her look good or possibly turn the heads of Oscar voters and she utterly flounders. It's so weird that this being an action vehicle that clearly has pretensions to birth a franchise (NEVER gonna happen) that this is the one she chooses that doesn't focus its attention almost solely on her. What's even weirder is that it contains so little actual action, but I'll get to that in a minute.
She was great in Take Shelter, but that was nearly a decade ago, and A Most Violent Year and The Martian were great, although I'm not sure they were much to do with her. After that, I'm not sure I've ever seen her in anything I liked or thought she really elevated. And while I will always want to support any woman-led action film or franchise, there's no way I can support this shit.
I just am now unconvinced that there really is a great actor in there. Her performance here is a truly flat one. Her character is potentially quite interesting, riddled with addictions and familial issues, but she just seems so uninterested in this. She produced it, so I'm not sure what her excuse is, but this is a pure D-rate action concept anyway so it doesn't really benefit her being in it, to her slight defence.
Aside from an unexpected brawl between Colin Farrell and John Malkovich, which really is the only fun moment in this whole thing, there are just no positives here at all. It seems to have been cranked out with no true idea of what it wants to be or where it wants to go, with a plot that has even less effort put into it than your usual disposable 90 minute action junk.
Subplots and support characters come and go to no particular fanfare and while it's over and done with fairly swiftly, nobody really emerges from this with any credit, which is saying a lot considering the talented cast on board. And where's the action? Why does this action film spend most of its time on Chastain's irritating family?
They dodged a bullet that this never got the chance to get a cinema release. Mind you, it barely deserves the indignity of being buried away quietly on a VOD release, that's how wretched the whole affair is.