Ava was a huge let down to its talented cast. This is such a paint by numbers movie that had almost every cliche in the genre. It offers no surprise at all. If you’ve seen enough action thrillers dealing with the assassin world, you will spot everything coming. It doesn’t offer anything new for the genre. The only surprises the film has would maybe be the ones that made me roll my eyes as they went there.
The film follows Ava (Jessica Chastain), a deadly assassin who works for a black ops organization, traveling the globe specializing in high profile hits. When a job goes dangerously wrong, she is forced to fight for her survival.
Let’s start with the directing. I feel Tate Taylor was the wrong director for this movie. While some of the action scenes looked good, I think that’s due more to the choreography and not so much his camera work. I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to hire the guy who did The Help and Ma for an action thriller. However, I do understand he was employed at the last minute to replace Matthew Newton, who also wrote the screenplay after the latter was fired due to domestic violence charges. So Tate honestly did the best work that a for-hire director could do outside of his comfort zone.
Speaking of Newton, his script was terrible, predictable, and dull. From the military background to the double-crossing, it’s all here. There is little left to the imagination. A weak point for the film is that there’s hardly any story here. Despite the action sequence being good at times, they tend to fight for no reason other than wanting to pick up the pace and give their audience some fights to wake them up from the boredom. There is often no reason for there to be a fight, which is why I feel some were added for pacing reasons.
Jessica Chastain was as good as the script allowed her to be. She was outstanding in the fight sequence, but she’s no ScarJo in Lucy. We know she’s a great actress, so she does bring some emotions to her character, who was a bit undercooked. I feel she needs to stay out of this genre as this and Dark Phoenix haven’t been great career moves.
Chastain’s character is a recovering alcoholic, but I feel they didn’t fully use it to their advantage, an actress as talented as Chastain could have done great stuff with that material. Still, it was just wasted and only added to give her character more baggage. She’s our lead, but along with the rest of the unlikeable supporting cast, there is no reason for us to root for her.
Despite playing a role we’ve come to know him for, Colin Farrell felt wasted to me. They didn’t make his character enjoyable; his motives for what he does in the movie aren’t explained sufficiently. If you’ve seen enough movies like these, you can predict many of his character’s actions before he does them. His casting doesn’t help the film other than giving it some star power.
John Malkovich is another actor that’s wasted here. He’s playing a similar role here in Mile 22 as a mentor who takes the lead under their wing and is their surrogate father. He has some good scenes with Chastain that added a bit of humor to a movie that needed it big time.
Next up is Common, a rapper-turned-actor who I’ve enjoyed in certain films, but he isn’t excellent here. John Wick: Chapter 2 showed us how well he could work in the action thriller genre, but under the direction of somebody who isn’t as talented as Chad Stahelski, he felt out of place.
In a massive surprise, as she’s nowhere in the marketing, it was nice to see Geena Davis make an appearance here. Besides Grey’s Anatomy, I haven’t seen her in anything in over a decade. The script doesn’t ask much of her. She makes two appearances as the mother of Chastain’s character, and I liked her scenes as it added some much-needed info into the life of our titular character outside of her profession.
The film’s ending is incredibly anti-climactic, especially for a movie like this. However, by that point, I wasn’t surprised by the film not being able to deliver.
Ava is honestly one of those movies that make you wonder how it attracted so many big names. They shouldn’t and couldn’t need the money that bad. The saving grace for the movie was that it was only 90 minutes long, so it thankfully wasn’t too much of an investment for me.
