Everly is a boobs and blood movie, plain and simple. Its story is paper-thin—barely existent—and the two things it focuses all of its energy on doing are putting an absurd amount of violence on the screen and proving that Salma Hayek is a leading lady who’s still got it. Fans of B-movies and cinema exploitation are very much the targeted audience here, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because all of the over-the-top deaths that director Joe Lynch and his team have conceived for this film are a lot of fun to watch be brought to splattery life, and Salma Hayek does indeed still got it. Boy, does she still got it. It’s not a sin for a movie to just want to be empty-headed and entertaining, is it?
There is a complication with tone that makes movies like this more difficult to pull off than they may seem though. Take the mayhem on display too seriously and the lack of a real story or any character complexity starts to look like a problem with the film, but wink at the audience and get too satirical with the bloodshed and you take all of the joy out of the ridiculousness. Movie cheese is less fun when it’s obvious the filmmaker is in on the joke. Fortunately, Everly is able to straddle this line by taking a comedy of errors approach to all of its endless killing.
When we first meet Hayek’s title character, she’s in an elaborate apartment where she’s been held captive by a powerful criminal named Taiko (Hiroyuki Watanabe) and used as a sex slave for a number of years. After finding out that she has been working with the police to take him down, Taiko sends a horde of assassins after Everly to shut her mouth for good, but what he doesn’t count on is the fact that she has a gun hidden in her toilet tank, Godfather-style, that she intends on using to defend herself; and thanks to his hired killers taking her less seriously than they should and a miracle-level amount of good luck, defend herself she does. After an initial bloody encounter with the first wave of killers, Everly spends the rest of the film shooting her way through the endless reinforcements that come her way, all in an attempt at escaping and making a future for the estranged young daughter that she’s been kept from since the girl was a baby.
Adding in the child element is enough to give us a tiny bit of investment in Everly as a character, so that we don’t take all of the elaborate and gory death that she creates as a pointless and eventually numbing showcase of effects work and action direction, but it never gets harped on enough that we start to feel like we’re watching anything more than a relatively brainless shoot ‘em up either. And, perhaps most importantly, we’re never asked to accept Hayek’s diminutive kept woman as some kind of elite badass, which would have taken the tone of the film to places of complete farce. Instead of using toughness and skill, Everly is able to murder dozens of men through an almost joyous series of lucky breaks and misunderstandings. The plot of this movie plays out almost like an episode of Three’s Company, only with a main character trying to figure out how she’s going to kill a bunch of people instead of figuring out how she’s going to hide a buxom young conquest from Mr. Furley. Hayek plays Everly as a woman who’s determined to survive her situation and reunite with her daughter, but there’s also a handful of moments where she takes the time to stop and joyously marvel at her inexplicable ability to keep getting the better of these career killers, and that makes her exploits a ton of fun to follow.
There are a few problems with the gauntlet of head shots and eviscerations that make up the bulk of this movie though. Clearly Lynch was shooting this thing on a very small budget, and there are a few times where his imagination gets a little bit bigger than his pocketbook. For one, the general look of the film is low rent digital in maybe the worst way you can imagine. For another, the sheer scope and insanity of the violence on display, and the imagination that went into all of the different ways one over-her-head woman might kill an army’s worth of people, is definitely impressive, but there are a time or two where the nuts and bolts effects work of bringing those deaths to life are so distractingly fake that you’re taken out of even the hyper-realism of this world (the amount of blood getting splattered around is awesome, the amount of said blood that looks computer generated is not). Plus, any time the film tries to move its action away from the small set of Everly’s apartment and the hallway outside her door in order to venture into the outside world, things get so basic cable looking that you can’t help but shake your head in bemusement.
All that being said, a cheap aesthetic, a crude world view, and a less than awards worthy script are nothing new when it comes to the exploitation genre, so if you’re somebody who tends to enjoy the base entertainment that grindhouse schlock has been offering up since back in the day, you should be able to find a lot about Everly to love too. The film only asks you for 95 minutes of your time, after all. When you’re in and out of your audience’s lives that quick, you can get away with doing little more than offering up a quick dose of life’s simple pleasures. Big boobs, buckets of blood, and an endless hail of bullets—what more could the fifteen-year-old-boy living inside all of us want?
