When her boss, mentor and AA sponsor (Antonio Banderas) is brutality murderd, PI Alice Eve sets out to avenge him. Banderas's Mikhail Tellini had been working as a consultant for an understaffed rural Irish police department, on a similarly brutal murder of a wealthy local. Soon Eve's Cassie Holt and local sergeant Rory McMahon (Paul Reid) are looking into a secretive group of wealthy locals, while trying to outsmart a serial killer whose begun to pick them off. Trauma in Cassie's own past and a mysterious young woman (Shelley Hennig) also play heavily into the plot.
While not well reviewed and certainly overwrought and clichéd at times, this worked for me. Part of me thought I was better then this movie and it's tricks, but the characters are solid and I found myself invested in the story. Most of Eve and Banderas's scenes together are told in flashback because he dies so early in the film, at first I was uncertain about the narrative usefulness of this storytelling device but it won me over by the end. The film also indulges in something of an expectation subverting cheat, yet still manages to make it feel like it's earned and not a cheat. With bad guys worthy of hate and some reasonably effective catharsis, this is solid pulp which I'm giving an arguably better then it deserves ***
Also I wish this movie had a better name.
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