“Either you help me, or shut the f*ck up,” says Everly (Salma Hayek) to one of the men left partially alive in her swank bordello apartment after she just laid waste to the rest of the men that had taken turns raping her. You see, Everly has been a sex slave for the past four years along with several other women occupying the same floor in the same apartment building, working under the thumb of Taiko (Hiroyuki Watanabe), an ex lover and dangerous mob boss. However, when Taiko threatens her family, Everly doesn’t hesitate to do what’s necessary to keep her mother and daughter safe. Only problem is, she’s trapped in this apartment building and they are running for their lives in the streets. What’s a girl to do?
Played as a hard-R actioner with attempted doses of humor, director Joe Lynch isn’t entirely able to capture the same kind of joyful energy he found in his directorial debut Wrong Turn 2: Dead End, which had just the right amount of backwoods gore as it did humor. Everly does, however, find its title character under fire not only by Taiko’s band of goons and paid off police, but also from fellow gun-toting hookers equipped with a multitude of weapons and many enjoying a variety of bloody deaths. All to say, this movie isn’t without a bit of the violent “fun” you’re looking for, but it just doesn’t entirely click.
Lynch establishes a rather cliche villain in Taiko as Everly plays more like a videogame where you know Taiko will be the big boss Everly will need to take down at the end, but not before bludgeoning her way through a variety of obstacles, one level at a time. The storytelling and acting is also on par with a videogame as Hayek has always had a hard time playing convincing roles when she’s asked to act in English and the wooden dialogue hardly inspires much emotional investment as the primary goal here is the salacious joy of blood splattered walls.
Clearly shot on a very small budget, Lynch has done the best he can with what he’s given, choosing to spend money on a few gory visual effects rather than on additional takes or more talented supporting actors. He goes for the shot of the young girl standing in a hallway about to be mauled by a snarling German Shepherd rather than worrying about searching for reason as to why she’d be there in the first place. You take it all in stride as it does offer up an interesting game of fetch with a grenade and while Everly may have never picked up a gun before today, she sure proves quite resourceful when necessary.
Everly will satisfy a lust for gunfire and scenes where someone is force fed hydrochloric acid, but don’t go in expecting top notch cinema or storytelling. You’ll get a few laughs and a few moments of explosive action, but all-in-all you won’t remember or feel the need to talk about this one a few hours after seeing it.
