Ava (2020)
2020
R
97 Minutes
Action | Crime | Drama | Thriller
A black ops assassin is forced to fight for her own survival after a job goes dangerously wrong.
User Review
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Of all the films that I’ve seen this year, “AVA” has already shaped itself to be perhaps the most generic movie medium publication I’ve seen in recent memory as well as the most boring. This entire 97 minute spy assassin movie feels like an early video game tech demo: every single element has been half-assed to oblivion, grudgingly existing out of contractual obligation with only the bare minimum functionality required to be watchable but no effort to be fun or even balanced. Subtlety and nuance must be a foreign concept in this cookie-cutter Jason Bourne banal lookalike pile of cliché stacked like LEGO bricks because nothing interesting about any of these characters ever come into fruition and even the film itself is aware of how little it gives a shit because the acting doesn’t try to elevate them either. There’s little to no worldbuilding or atmosphere involved, direction was amateur, dialogue was piss poor, all the frenetic camera movement makes the cinematography and editing erratic and nearly incomprehensible and the truncated poorly staged action sequences reeks more of lazy production than any conscious effort as a result. Granted, it’s not as bad as Resident Evil: The Final Chapter or Bayformers but it’s hard to NOT notice nauseating shaky-cam when I see it.
All of that is before we get to the cliché-storm the film has as a story: Ava is master assassin with a generic dead parent, estranged family and traumatic backstory with a military background who starts questioning orders from her superiors and falling foul of her employers who begin to turn on her when a job goes wrong; And I hope you can count all that on one hand because that seriously is as specific as I can get about the plot. Everyone has a haunted past...infidelities...alcoholism... gambling addiction...cliché after cliché after poorly executed cliché. Then again, I am being generous when I say “plot” because the film doesn’t really have one: it has three to four unrelated plotlines messily sewn together and screwing on the floor doing the worm.
No exaggeration: the last action sequence was the only instance that me enjoying anything here. It had the best choreography in the film bar none and the cinematography and editing were a lot less jarring compared to the rest of the fight scenes.
Coin in whatever excuses you want: everybody in this movie was wasted on such a malodorous tripe of a story and I am not siting through this oppressively boring movie a second time to revisit whatever aspects of the plot I did miss because I’m aware there’s nothing really worth mentioning anyways. Even in the instances where the film tries to have fun with itself, it wasn’t even a cheesy kind of fun; just lazy. Well.....there goes another on my worst of the year list.1 member likes this review.
