Four years is a long time to be trapped with people who don't respect you. People who want to silence
your voice. People who want to use you, and don’t
care about your health and well-being.
People who endanger your family. Salma
Hayek’s titular character from 2014’s high action siege movie EVERLY knows
about these people, and she’s determined that four years are all they are going
to get from her.
The Capsule:
We come into the worst day of Everly’s (Salma Hayek)
thoroughly fucked up life, already in progress.
Her only shot of escaping four years of slavery under the Yakuza boss
Taiko (Hiroyuki Watanabe) has gone tits
up in spectacular fashion. Her only
option seems to be to lay down and die.
Instead, she blows away a whole room full of gangster scumbags and
plunges headlong into a new plan: kill everyone who stands between her and the
door. More important than her own
freedom, she must make sure her mother (Laura Cepeda) and daughter Maisey (Aisha
Ayamah) get the money she has squirreled away in order to buy them another
life. Blocked at every turn, Everly must
deal with wave after wave of killer prostitutes, corrupt cops, guard dogs, and
vicious torturers who are all determined to keep the boss’ plaything in her
place. Everly has had enough and she is willing to bring the entire building down if it means saving her
daughter from the hell she has endured.
Selma Hayek is phenomenal as Everly. She's a badass, but in the same way John
McClane was in DIE HARD. She doesn’t
want to be in that situation, she just doesn’t have a choice. She is terrified in the beginning, stumbling
and not knowing exactly what to do. The
first time she picks up a submachine gun, she empties the clip into the ceiling
without hitting anything. The only think
keeping her going is her unwavering determination.
Like John McClane, she takes an ever increasing amount of
punishment throughout the movie. A bullet
wound through the side (and later the shoulder), cuts, gashes, contusions, acid
burns, she has to push through it all.
Luckily for her, she also follows McClane’s rule that gunshots only
hurt when you can see them bleeding. Slap
some duct tape on and she’s doing fine.
Everly may start out shaky, but once she gets her confidence
back, she is a serious piece of work. Nothing
is revealed about what Everly was like before the abduction. There is no indication she had any special
training, but she's good with a gun and not squeamish about having to kill a guy
(or twenty), so she wasn’t an average soccer mom. She knows how to leverage her
advantages. She takes out a squad of
goons in full tactical gear by being faster, smarter, and even more ruthless.
It should be noted that Selma Hayek was 48 years old when
she made this movie. Time has been very,
very good to her. She is amazingly fit,
able to roll with some grueling fight sequences and lug around a huge machine
gun believably. She had a stunt double
for the extreme stuff like diving over counters and getting blown through
doorways, but Hayek herself is slogging her way through the majority of the
punishment. And even under all the
bruises and blood, she is still fiercely beautiful.
Incidentally, the role of Everly was originally slated for
Kate Hudson. I cannot even imagine what
the hell that movie would look like. There
aren’t that many Yakuza rom-coms out there.
Structurally, EVERLY is a very odd movie. The bulk of its running time is spent in only
one location, the (initially) luxurious apartment that has been Everly’s cell
for the last four years. There are
eventually quick trips to the hall way and to an adjacent apartment, and we get
to see other parts of the building through security footage, but otherwise this
could be an extremely violent and explosive stage play.
The subject matter is incredibly dark, and it does not shy
away from indicating exactly what these Yakuza bastards think of women. When Taiko threatens to bring in Everly’s
little girl to fill her vacancy at the hotel, we know the sick son of a bitch
isn’t bluffing.
For as grim and gritty as the tone can be, the movie veers
into some very crazy territory. Everly’s
first trial after defying Taiko is to fend off a group of bombastic Yakuza
prostitutes all fighting for the brand new bounty placed on her head. They all live and work together on the same
level of the apartment building, so it has an additional awkward quality, like
being attacked by the people in your office.
They seem to have more freedom (and a lot more weapons) than Everly,
though. A couple of them are straight up
murderous, but several are sympathetic to her plight. The money is just too good to pass up. Except that they really should have.
Director Joe Lynch has his own style, but he owes a lot to
Tarantino, especially with the injection of morbid humor into a tense
situation. One example is when Everly
realizes Maisey is face to face with Bonsai, a vicious and much disliked guard
dog. Bonsai’s smirking handler keeps his
hand on the dog’s collar as Everly slowly reaches down to pick up her child,
letting him loose just as she grabs her.
Everly races back into the apartment and is a second away from being
torn apart when she tosses a grenade into the hall. The dog bolts out to fetch it, with the
handler running after yelling, “Bonsai, that’s not a ball!” Boom.
The action is quick, frantic, but well shot and easy to
track. It can also be satisfyingly over
the top. One scene has Everly tossing a
grenade into an elevator full of gangsters just as the doors close. There is the sound of an explosion and a huge
jet of blood shoots from between the seam of the doors. It’s like a miniature version of the blood
elevator from THE SHINNING.
There are long pauses in between the action sequences when
Everly gets to catch her breath. She
even has the chance to clean up the apartment and take a shower before her mom
and Maisey show up. I found this
initially unnatural and distracting, but there is an explanation near the end
that makes sense. More importantly, it
gives the movie time to develop some true pathos between characters (the ones
that last more than 30 seconds, at least).
One of them is a victim of Everly’s first shooting
spree. Referred to callously as Dead Man
by Everly, Akie Kotabe spends all of his screen time slowly bleeding to death
on a couch. Everly eases his suffering
out of basic human compassion, but she doesn’t let him off the hook just
because he is a soft spoken, gentle nerd in a suit. Even though he didn’t participate in the
abuse the other Yakuza inflicted on her (thankfully off screen), he did not
stop them either. In time though, she
realizes he was in the same boat as her, forced by the Yakuza do to things that
revolted him. He is just another sad, isolated
victim, though more by choice than Everly.
In the last moments of his life, he has finally made a real connection
with a person, the woman who shot him.
His best moment is when he distracts Everly’s daughter from finding a
stack of bodies by singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” with her. It isn’t enough to wipe the slate of his life
clean, but it is the best he can do.
Everly has some very touching moments with her daughter, who
was one year old the last time she saw her.
They are both awkward and unsure of each other. Aisha Ayamah is a real cutie and plays Maisey
with such shy innocence, it’s almost an emotional cheat. Those scenes would be touching to anyone with
an empathic bone in their body. The real
gut wrenching scenes come with Everly’s mother.
Not realizing what she has had to endure, her mom gives Everly hell for
abandoning her daughter. Everly has a
more than valid excuse, but just sits there in the bathroom and lets her mother
unload, overcome by four years of unreasonable but ever present guilt. Once Everly explains what happened, corroborated
by a bathtub full of dead gangsters, the two mothers finally have a true
reconciliation. It’s a beautiful and
powerful moment.
Good feelings only last a second, because then we come to
the most batshit part of the movie, Togo Igawa as The Sadist. He arrives wheeling in a half-naked man in a slender
cage of hooked bars, accompanied by four freaks dressed as Kabuki demons. Keep in mind, this is the guy the Yakuza call when they need things to get
really hardcore, so we know he is bad news.
You never want to meet a cordial, well-dressed man carrying a medical
bag filled with delicate bottles of various acids and poisons. The entire sequence gets more and more surreal and frightening, especially once he gets Everly in the cage. The power quickly shifts back and forth several times before the Sadist gets
his fitting (and extremely messy) end.
The final showdown with Taiko is an all-out battle of wills;
supreme arrogance and cruelty against unbreakable ferocity. It doesn’t matter that Taiko has the upper
hand. As he slides his razor sharp sword
across her skin, waxing on about the divine brutality of Yakuza love, she’s coming
up with different ways to tell him to go fuck himself. She will never again be his slave. No matter what he does to her, she’s already
beaten him. And she still has a few more
tricks up her sleeve.
Metaphorically. She’s
wearing a tank top.
Everly’s situation is considerably more extreme than
anything we are likely to face during our four year cohabitation with a
cartoonish villain. I also admit that
some of us have had to deal with blatant disrespect and hostility for far more
than four years (an entire lifetime, for instance, or many lifetimes). But focusing on these upcoming four years in
particular, there is a lot to take away from EVERLY. We won’t (or shouldn’t) be fighting with
bullets or grenades or swords, but we can fight with our words and actions and
solidarity. We can make it very clear
right from the beginning that four years is all they are going to get from us. Hopefully we don’t have to do it in ten inch
high heels, though. They look painful.
C Chaka
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