What, if anything, does the title Everly convey to you? By that, I mean, shouldn’t an action film carry a name that suggests — if not promises — y’know, action? In that aspect, Everly arrives holding an enticement level of zero; at most, it sounds like a music biopic of those brothers who kindly told Little Susie she needed to wake the eff up.
I don’t want to see that. I do, however, want to see a balls-out ammo-fest starring Salma Hayek as a prostitute with remarkably good aim. That’s what Everly is — or at least strives to be — but with a moniker like that, it is all but counting on audiences to ignore its existence. To paraphrase the film’s running gag, A Lot of Dead Whores would look better splashed across a one-sheet, not to mention weed out a sizable chunk of viewers who would find the flick tasteless. While Everly’s crassness is debatable, it’s not exactly defendable, either.
Returning to those Desperado days that helped make her famous, Hayek gives it her all and gets physical — really physical — as Everly, a high-class sex slave who finds herself in a do-or-die situation, so she chooses “do.” She’s trapped in an apartment building infested with members of the Japanese yakuza crime syndicate. With animal-print heels on her feet and weapons in her hands, she fires away with abandon in an attempt to escape. Don’t expect a floor-by-floor takedown like The Raid: Redemption — she rarely and barely leaves the room.
That’s about all there is to it. Director/co-writer Joe Lynch (Knights of Badassdom) tries to wedge some family drama in there, but that peg doesn’t fit the slot. Hard-wringing and heart-tugging have no legitimate claim to a battlefield strung with jacked-up sadomasochists, costumed warriors and bounty-seeking strumpets. And yet by sidestepping the one issue that would give Everly more purpose (her rape, unseen but used as a starting line), Lynch denies her deeper character motivation. We’re left with much go boom about nothing.
Although funny in quick bursts, Everly is never as fun as it believes itself to be. For example, it is set at Christmastime for no other reason than to allow for multiple ironic uses of holiday tunes to score scenes of splatter. Once is cute; beyond that pushes it. For a project that seems to have been engineered as the Most Awesomest Movie Ever, Dude, some ingredient is lacking to hold the thing together, so it feels utterly pointless. Violence for violence’s sake can work — see 2007’s self-parodying Shoot ’Em Up for proof — but Lynch wants to play up the gore at times purely for laughs and at others purely for disgust; the problem in doing so is that both instances share a trough on the tonal wavelength. After a while of so much assault, you may wonder which reaction he wants, so you choose neither. —Rod Lott