114 min | R | July 14, 2021 | Netflix
Sam is a hired killer who breaks the rules of her syndicate to protect an eight-year-old girl. She teams up with her estranged mother and a library full of veteran assassins to survive the fallout. The cast is loaded and the colors pop, but the gun never finds anything to say.
Sam is a hitwoman who works for a criminal syndicate called The Firm. A job goes wrong and she ends up protecting an eight-year-old girl from the people who pay her. The setup is a revenge engine dressed in candy colors. Navot Papushado builds the film as a series of escalating set pieces inside a heightened world of diners, bowling alleys, and a library run by armed women. The film is about style as its own justification. It wants every frame to look like a comic book panel and treats plot as the thread between gunfights.
Karen Gillan plays Sam with a flat affect that reads as deadpan more than damaged. She handles the choreography well and sells the physical comedy of a fight where her arms are temporarily paralyzed. Chloe Coleman plays Emily, the girl Sam protects, and the two build a rapport that the script keeps interrupting for more carnage. Lena Headey plays Scarlet, Sam’s estranged mother, and brings more weight to her brief scenes than the material earns. Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh, and Angela Bassett run the library as a trio of veteran assassins and they walk away with every scene they share. Paul Giamatti plays Nathan, the handler caught between Sam and The Firm, with the weary professionalism of a man reading better lines in his head.
Papushado directs from a script he wrote with Ehud Lavski, and the visual scheme dominates everything. The cinematography drenches each location in saturated neon, pink and teal and acid green washing across the frame until the violence reads as decoration. The set pieces are staged with clear geography, and a fight choreographed around three henchmen Sam can barely lift is the rare sequence where the style serves the story. The production design turns the library and the diner into self-conscious sets rather than places. The score leans on retro needle drops that announce the cool instead of generating it.
The film assembles a cast of accomplished actresses and gives them a coloring book to act inside. Every reference is legible and every influence is on the surface. The action is competent and the look is precise, but the precision never deepens into anything. Sam protects Emily and reconnects with her mother, and none of it lands because the film cares more about how the blood looks than who is bleeding. This is a movie that mistakes its palette for a point of view.