Ava

Since starring in Zero Dark Thirty back in 2012, Jessica Chastain has been one of the most reliable actors around. She’s always believable and seems to bring the skills of a character actor to leading roles… And then there was X-Men: Dark Phoenix, in which she played Vuk – that’s right, Vuk – an evil, white-eyebrowed alien who wanted to kill Sansa Stark. She was bad, but in fairness, everyone was bad in that film, which somehow managed to be worse than 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand.

It was easy to overlook one bad movie, but now there’s another, because Ava is shit, and not fun shit, just shit shit.

So, the story. Chastain is an assassin, an amazing assassin, but an assassin with a heart who wants to know that her marks have actually done something to warrant being killed. This doesn’t sit well with her handler, John Malkovich, or her assassin organization’s boss, Colin Farrell, so Farrell tries to have her killed.

That might seem a bit extreme, especially because it’s surely not that easy to find good, reliable assassins. This problem is compounded when the assassin you send to kill your best assassin is just an ordinary assassin, so you end up with just one more dead assassin. Colin Farrell really needs to start appreciating his assassins. Instead, he kills John Malkovich, which means Ava has to kill him, obviously.

There’s a side story of Chastain being a recovering alcoholic and also being estranged from her sister, her mother – the Geena Davis, whose face doesn’t look real – and rapper Common, who’s her past lover and future brother-in-law – yeah, ewww. The side stories mean nothing; they’re just tired, failed attempts to make us care about the story.

In addition to caring, we’re also supposed to think this movie is smart. This, the filmmakers thought, would be achieved by a single, repeated line from Greek literature, “Count no man happy until the end is known.” The line is from Herodotus, and was said to King Croesus. However, in the movie, it’s attributed to Croesus himself, which makes the attempt to be smart pretty fucking stupid.

The reason everyone in the movie almost knows this line is that Malkovich makes all his trainee assassins read Greek literature, because of course he does – why wouldn’t he? The thing is, you know what’s going to happen in this movie almost from the opening credits, and you’ll be able to count yourself unhappy well before it ends. ☆