In practice, the concept of Jessica Chastain: Action Hero is something that we’d readily get behind, but the three-time Academy Award nominee really needs to choose better projects with which to showcase her undoubted ass-kicking credentials.
Simon Kinberg’s The 355 went down as this year’s first major box office bomb and found itself widely panned by critics and audiences alike, despite Chastain emerging with her reputation intact. She did the best she could with the material, as did the rest of the movie’s key players, they just deserved to lend their talents to something much better.
However, The 355 was at least vastly superior to Ava, which came and went without any fanfare at all in the summer of 2020. A 16% Rotten Tomatoes score and 29% user rating tells you all you need to know about Tate Taylor’s revenge-fueled tale of assassins and shadowy government organizations, but he wasn’t even the first name to sit in the director’s chair.
The B-tier actioner was scripted by Matthew Newton, who was originally set to pull double duty. When troubling allegations of assault and domestic violence were leveled at him in August 2018, though, Chastain was blasted in certain circles for being a hypocrite after publicly supporting the #MeToo movement. In the end, Newton quit rather than be fired, but not even an accomplished pair of hands like Taylor could save Ava.
Despite boasting Chastain, Colin Farrell, John Malkovich, Geena Davis, Common, and Ioan Gruffudd among the ensemble, the story of a wronged operative going rogue to track down her former employers after they put a hit out on her is derivative to the point of banality, but at least the leading lady acts as a respectably solid anchor.
In the end, Ava sank without a trace during its initial theatrical and VOD release, but it appears to be on the verge of a comeback. As per FlixPatrol, the terminally tedious effort has cracked HBO Max’s most-watched list, making us feel sorry for the subscribers who wasted 97 minutes of their lives.
Published: Mar 7, 2022 12:36 pm