Ava (2020) Review

 rating: ****

the story: A hitwoman is targeted for elimination by an associate who views her as a liability.

review: Here’s a movie I felt compelled to review based on the idiotic reviews I’ve so far seen for it. They seem fixated on its familiar plot. You can boil even the most innovative plot to something familiar. In this case the selling point is absolutely Jessica Chastain as the title character. Of course it is. To even begin to suggest anything else is to completely fail to comprehend the art of filmmaking.

But if you really want to boil it down, Ava could be called the Jessica Chastain John Wick. What made John Wick so much fun was how it helped viewers see Keanu Reeves as exciting again. Reeves has been pretty good at finding defining roles over the years. He’s got three recognizable franchises under his belt at this point. Ava was never going to be as popular as John Wick, for the same reason that Chastain doesn’t have the same kind of career as Reeves. It’s arguably tougher now than in Hollywood’s golden age for actresses. When it’s gotten tougher for actors in general to stand out in a blockbuster-saturated era (which has actually made 2020 refreshing, with so many blockbusters relocated away), women will especially struggle for attention. You have a few that critics can’t seem to get enough of, and then you have ones like Chastain and Cate Blanchett who more often than not are taken for granted.

Simply put, if this were an earlier era, it’d be a lot harder to say “blah, another Katherine Hepburn movie” (fully aware as I am that even Hepburn could be taken for granted, but the greater point here being Hepburn is a widely acknowledged cinematic treasure, and Chastain is not). The fact that Ava is a Chastain movie is absolutely itself a good enough reason to pay attention.

It’s like the John Wick version of her best movie(s) The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, if anything. As much attention is given to her professional problems (and prowess) as her domestic problems. This is a good year, if anything, for human women action stars, counting Blake Lively’s Rhythm Section. And while Lively is very human in all aspects, Chastain is given no room for doubt in her ability to survive a brutal fight, even if little space is even given how much her background hurts her, and the family she had to leave behind.

So the perceived limitations critics see in Ava are quite calculated. It’s a movie bold enough to let us know what we need to know but not dwell on it, and have flashy elements but not dwell on them.

The other reason I had to catch it was Colin Farrell, who costars as the guy who decides Chastain has become a liability. He shows flashes of real passion, something Farrell usually keeps below the surface. It’s one of his villainous roles, and yet another that also proves his utter lack of vanity, which is what has continually cost him mass appeal (early in his career, for instance, Farrell exhibited few qualms to looking less obviously heroic than his more famous costars, Tom Cruise in Minority Report and Bruce Willis in Hart’s War). It’s a great role at this point in his career.

Chastain’s ally against Farrell is John Malkovich, who gets to have an epic fight scene but also the kind of death that leaves you guessing until the end. Her mom is Geena Davis, and the one weak acting link is Common as her ex-lover. I don’t know why Common is so common.

If the problem is that it confounds expectations, then that’s a very good one for Ava to have. When people get around to appreciating Chastain, it ought to be remembered as the kind of thing only she could pull off.