Alternate Tagline: Middle-aged hotness has a name.
You could be forgiven for wondering if Everly opens half way through. As the film opens our hero Everly (Salma Hayek) appears already bloodied, bruised and – for no reason explained in the film – totally nude. She enters a small bathroom on wobbly (still shapely) legs filled with paralysing fear, before emerging all guns blazing and laying Rambo-esque waste to a large room filled with heavily armed Yakuza henchmen.
Welcome to Salma’s Keel Beel.
How Everly came to be a Yakuza hooker is anyone’s guess (mine would be because Lucy Liu said ‘no’ to the role), but with a big price on her head and her mother and daughter at stake, Everly cannot afford to sit still, let alone ponder the incongruity of her presence.
Not that she could if she wanted to. Apparently the word is out about the large bounty on her head, and Everly’s peers arrive, AKA the dozens of hookers that share the building, rushing headlong into the room at convenient intervals looking to get paid but ending up slayed…
…you’ll notice the film isn’t called ‘dozens of hookers’, which might lend a clue to their fates.
Frankly, Everly won’t be around long enough to be called much more than forgettable. This is so derivative and blatantly try-hard that at best its fate will be ‘ignored’, but for the thousands of… me-types… who wonder if Salma still has it two decades since Desperado.
Set entirely in the same floor of an apartment building, Everly tries to stretch the siege scene that served as the finale for Leon: The Professional by a mere eighty minutes, only without spending any time on character development or earning a skerrick of sympathy for anyone. Unless, that is, your sympathy is targeted at Salma’s career.
There is action aplenty, but while Salma’s physical assets are still astonishing even as she nears 50, they aren’t of the Jackie Chan or Jet Li variety. Everly is stabbed, punched, nearly poisoned and shot more than once, though she returns the favour a thousand fold. She escapes the inescapable and increasingly impossible with monotonous regularity, only to be thrust straight into the next room of doom.
Salma Hayek has been famous for twenty plus years despite having a ‘worthwhile’ list that you could probably make a peace sign with. In fact since Desperado and her five minute Hall of Fame cameo in From Dusk Till Dawn, her best moment was as a stripper in Dogma – are we noticing a trend here?
It is only because of these three roles that convinced me to pay attention to her latest exploits – especially when the blurb for the film is ‘Salma as sexy assassin’. Funny that a four word tag, where one word is the star’s name and the second a two letter joining word, still manages to contain a fallacy; Everly isn’t an assassin.
Ironically this is in keeping with the prevailing themes of confusion and disorganisation. Everly opens confusingly, continues predictably and ends… mercifully.
Final Rating – 6 / 10. Not likely to replace the Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn DVDs boys…
