Ava (2020)

Algorithms are very good at taking a massive amount of data, crunching it, and producing a product that fits a large swath of whatever needs appeasing, which is how Netflix’s systems came up with the once-beloved “House of Cards” (2013-2018) before we all realized that Kevin Spacey was just a large turd wearing human skin.
Unfortunately, while Netflix’s magic prediction box works great for mass audience appeasement, it’s not good for individual entertainment, which is how I found “Ava” (2020) listed with a 98% match for my movie taste buds.

Titular Ava (Jessica Chastain) was a highschool valedictorian who developed a severe drug problem, crashed her car while driving drunk, joined the US Army for a ‘new start,’ was honorably discharged with noted mental issues, and then somehow got hired into a company whose sole business function was killing people.
It wasn’t a particularly novel storyline, and the writing staff made it pretty clear they didn’t want to break any molds.

The first third of the movie was told in two timelines, because ‘artistic choices,’ which absolutely didn’t lend itself to cohesive storytelling at all: Ava killed a man in France, asked to go to Boston; then she was in Boston. Then she killed another man in Saudi Arabia, teleported to the Netherlands, asked to go to Boston again, and boom, she was in Boston again.
Except not quite, because apparently the two scenes in Boston were concurrent, and the overseas murders were what lead up to it, but because there were no title cards or ‘one week later’ type on-screen text and Ava was shown to be a master of disguise, it wasn’t actually that easy to track when she was out murdering and when she was simply traveling – especially because they showed her in a plane going over a dossier for her next assassination between Boston episodes, with the narration of the dossier starting while she was in Boston.
It was the same issue that plagued “A Vigilante” (2018), but somehow worse.

Ava’s handler, Duke (John Malkovich), was a kindly father figure who was constantly on the lookout for her mental health, and also a wizard, as he could apparently teleport between Ireland and anywhere else exactly as the script needed him to, ignoring things like time or logic.

Ava – again, played by the gorgeous Jessica Chastain – spent a majority of the movie looking like she had just crawled out of a depression cocoon and wanted coffee before going to hide away from the world again.
I’m pretty sure director Tate Taylor did that to a) make her assassin disguises that much more drastic for when she needed to peacock and honeypot her victims, and b) because Ava was a pretty broken character who probably didn’t actually care that much about her appearance.
Same problem Olivia Wilde had in “A Vigilante.”
I get it: women don’t exist simply to be pretty on screen, but it seems like a weird choice to pick such a pretty actress specifically for her to dress down for a majority of the film that’s marketing her as the lead, made even worse when the movie poster is of one of the two scenes where she’s dressed up.

So anyway.
Ava worked for Duke, who worked for Simon (Colin Farrell), a man of some unknown level of importance in the inexplicable hierarchy of the vague yet menacing “company” that they were all somehow employed by.
Director Tate Taylor did his movie a terrible disservice: he never bothered to add anything close to an explanation for how the company operated. Yes, world-wide assassin societies are a cinematic option – “John Wick” (2014) opened that door – but this ‘company’ just had people offed, and then payed their assassins a commission with funds they got from… who knows where.
This narrative problem could have been very easily solved with one scene, not even five minutes long, showing Duke or Simon negotiating a price with a prospective customer for how much it would cost to take out a mark, which would then explain how Ava could earn $75K for a kill, mission-specific costumes, any hourly wage for intel-gathering employees, plane tickets, etc.
Lacking any other explanation, ‘a leprechaun’s pot of gold’ becomes as viable an option as anything else.

At one point prior to the movie, it was established that Ava had a mental breakdown due to unknown events, and thus the only reasonable solution was to kill her, which kicked off everything we watched.
Simon hired another assassin to do it, which failed, obviously. Then Duke found out and confronted Simon and got himself killed. Then Simon tried to kill Ava, but he died instead, because how else was this movie going to end?

Ava’s reason for going to Boston was her tenuous connection with her family and ex-fiancé (who was now engaged to her sister), who spent most of the movie treating her like shit, only to come around in whatever last scene they had with her.

Which leads me to a major issue: while I was able to follow all of the characters’ actions and motivations, everyone felt so very two-dimensional. There was no fleshing anyone out until it was their last scene on screen, at which point the writers crammed in some half-assed character development so they could say “look, we did it!” without actually putting in the work throughout the story to make anyone anything more advanced than a two-word tag-line.
Even Ava, who was the lead character and thus the most important one to build up, was hardly more than a series of action sequences tied together by bouts of self-hatred. She had 41 confirmed kills as an assassin for this company, and yet somehow had moral quandaries with all of them.

Somewhere in there we were unfortunately exposed to an entirely irrelevant subplot of Ava saving her ex-fiancé Michael (Common) from a crime boss to whom he owed a lot of money and… that’s it. She helped him, and it was all done. It had no ties to the rest of the story, the company, Simon or Duke, and barely even connected to the family that she hardly wanted to be with.

The special effects were okay. It was almost entirely fighting sequences, so whoever the stunt-doubles were did a fine job. Unfortunately, a surprising and noticeable number of camera scenes – even non-fighting scenes – were about as stable as a kid who’d just eaten an entire bowl of sugar, with excessive and unnecessary camera shaking that kept distracting me from what was actually happening on-screen.

The music existed, occasionally, but a majority of the movie was silent; when the music did play, it was entirely unmemorable.

The pacing for this was completely broken too - 90 minutes is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to tell a story about an assassin out for revenge or fear or whatever.
But, somehow, we got to the 70-minute mark and it didn’t feel like it had come anywhere close to building a reasonable arc, and the finale felt entirely non-impactful.

Oh, and I don’t think anyone on set had ever seen a human being run before, because despite Ava being a super in-shape assassin, she ran like a dweeb; a fact made extra noticeable by the fact that they kept showing scenes of Ava running for exercise!
Seriously – at least three scenes showed Ava jogging around Boston, and in all of them her arms and elbows were out at such a weird angle it looked like she was attempting some upper-body stretches instead of efficient arm swinging.

I’m really annoyed that I watched this, especially because Netflix listed it with such a high compatibility rating.
Fortunately, it came out during a pandemic and I didn’t have to pay to see it in theaters, because then I would have been even more annoyed.
That said: even spending 90 minutes watching it on my couch was too much, as this would barely have been worth it to watch on a plane ride.

2 Claws, because it wasn’t even couch-worthy.
At least “A Vigilante” can explain away it’s less-than-cinematic issues because it was a movie about marital abuse and filicide; “Ava” doesn’t have a similar excuse.
And it’s not even like we can blame COVID for causing a terrible movie to get made – this was released in September, which means an overwhelming majority of its production was done pre-pandemic.