“Everly”

Based on her recent credits, Salma Hayek may be the last person anyone would expect to go out guns blazing. In the last few years, she’s starred in disposable junk ranging from both Grown-Ups films to Here Comes the Boom, provided vocals for Puss in Boots, and made a cameo in Muppets Most Wanted. In between, Hayek showed up for Oliver Stone’s Savages, a reminder that she has an edge and knows her way around grimmer brands of drama than Adam Sandler films can provide.

Hence Everly, a one-room movie starring Hayek, directed by Joe Lynch, and boasting more bloodshed than the average Quentin Tarantino film. But it’s not just Everly’s penchant for carnage that calls Tarantino to mind; Lynch’s film is a curation of widely varying influences. It’s easy to sniff out traces of Edgar Wright and Joe Carnahan without even trying, but they’re blended with notes of Miike Takashi, Park Chan-wook, Matthew Vaughn, and even a little Robert Rodriguez, who once directed Hayek in Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn. Everly wears its inspirations on its bullet-riddled sleeve.

The film focuses on its titular character, a prostitute-cum-indentured servant to the barbaric crime lord Taiko (Hiroyuki Watanabe). The story begins in Everly’s lavish apartment, which we quickly learn is just a nicely furnished prison. She’s actually been handed down a death sentence for secretly working with the police to take Taiko down, who responds to the threat by having her tortured. But she kills her torturers all in the blink of an eye, and so begins an onslaught of incursions from Taiko’s army of killers. The bad guys come in standard and more exotic flavors; black-suited, faceless thugs are a staple, but other prostitutes in neighboring flats come after Everly, too. Eventually, her attackers graduate into kabuki-themed torturers and S.W.A.T. teams.

Everly doesn’t have a lot of interest in reality, and if you’re okay with that, then you’ll enjoy the ride. Lynch paces his film carefully, allowing for quick beats of story and character between each operatic and absurd action sequence. Everly has a daughter, it turns out, who, at her grandmother’s behest, eventually makes her way to Mom’s place and adds a new wrinkle to Lynch’s over-the-top mayhem. But child endangerment and family reunions are a side dish to Everly’s main course of grisly violence. Anyone tuning in for emotional catharsis will be disappointed, though Lynch smartly deploys his setpieces and leaves little room for consideration in between each. You’ll be engaged but not enlightened.

There are, in fairness, mostly arresting ideas here; they’re just not carried through for very long, in part because Everly isn’t a film with a built-in attention span. Do men act like savages solely under social pressure from other men? Is the average male slave to the darkest impulses of his id? Could be, but you’re better off seeking answers to those questions in smarter films. For everyone else, the movie’s parade of head shots, body shots, melting guts, and exploding elevators supplies plenty of nasty entertainment made with electrifying verve. Maybe Hayek ought to play the badass heroine more often.