Movie Review: Salma Hayek in the Bloody “Everly”

Salma Hayek (Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Frida) stars in this bloody actioner curated by Joe Lynch, director of Wrong Turn 2 and Knights of Badassdom.

Salama plays Everly, the girlfriend, in the roughest of use of the word, of mob boss Taiko. Everly has been kept in an apartment for Taiko’s amusement for four years and, in attempt to free herself, has contacted a police detective. Taiko gets word of her betrayal and sends anyone willing to kill Everly to her apartment where she wards off wave after wave of prostitutes, henchman, kabuki, and even swat teams in an effort to survive the night.

Everly’s shtick is that the entire film takes place in her apartment. The camera never makes it farther than the hallway and an apartment across the hall belonging to another of Taiko’s many prostitutes. This is more suffocating than clever and not at all original. The process made the film episodically repetitive as the same situation monotonously unfolded again and again; someone enters the apartment to kill Everly, there’s a shootout, and just as it looks as if Everly is doomed something or someone saves her be it someone thought to be dead on the couch or her mother whom she calls to the apartment with Everly’s four year old daughter whom she has raised.

Critically the film is not good but the entertainment value is high. Joe Lynch has made a bad movie with all the qualifiers of a grindhouse cult classic: a beautiful woman wielding guns, lots of action, and eccentric supporting characters. The stakes are only raised in that Everly wants to protect her daughter whom she meets for the first time in the film but that keeps the plot one dimensional. We’re never made to genuinely empathize with Everly but at the same time the desire to see her escape each new encounter with death is ever present.

Everly is in theaters now.