Ava (Jessica Chastain) is a deadly mercenary who works for a black ops organisation, travelling the globe and specialising in high profile hits. Ava’s career takes a sudden, bad turn when a high profile job goes wrong due to faulty information provided to her. She is told to take a break until the heat blows over, but secretly, someone, has ordered a hit on her to ensure nothing traces back to the company.

Due to a family tragedy, Ava decides to go back home to Boston and attempt to mend her relationship with her mother (Geena Davis who ironically also played a female assassin in Long Kiss Goodnight) and sister, Judy, though the homecoming proves to be far from happy as the years of estrangement have created resentment.

To complicate things further, Ava discovers that her ex-fiancé is involved with an underground gambling ring that Ava knows all too well from her younger days. Ava has to save her family and herself from multiple threats, while battling her own demons.

We love movies here (a known fact) especially when they’re rendered and shown on the big screen, so we can’t wait to checkout this one. Catch AVA next week Friday, 28 August.

Cast – Jessica Chastain, Mark Strong, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alison Pill, Jake Lacy, John Lithgow & Sam Waterston

Director – John Madden

Genre – Drama film/Thriller

Running Time – 2h 12m

The Plot

Officially in cinemas this week (17^th Mar), Miss Sloane is based on a woman called Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain), a cutthroat lobbyist who revels on power and is a functioning paranoid. In addition, she is an adrenaline and pill junkie, she advocates for reducing taxes on imported palm oil for Asian governments but she finds a sense of morality and works to strengthen universal background checks bill against her employer’s position. She works against the Gun lobbies with their opposition team. She wins at first but hits a snag which was something she foresaw and have placed illegal measures to counter any offense and shape the outcome.

In reading the above you can’t help but think that there is something to it and you wouldn’t be mistaken. Despite that though I was a bit hesitant to give it a watch especially when you think that it’s just over 2 hours long and not much has been said about it prior. In the end though, the decision to go ahead and watch was a great one. It’s also important to mention that this is not an action-packed movie full of explosions, fight scenes, theatrics etc., instead what it is, is a movie with a great plot and a stellar cast to boot.

The movie is not perfect and probably won’t appeal to everyone, it’s more for an engaged and mature audience who watch for the content, acting and plot lines set.

In her role as the lead actor, Jessica Chastain does a fantastic job in bringing her character to life and making it as realistic as possible. Everything hinges on her character as Elizabeth Sloane who as mentioned before does whatever it takes, including crossing the legal lines sometimes, to get the job done. The movie is not perfect and probably won’t appeal to everyone, it’s more for an engaged and mature audience who watch for the content, acting and plot lines set. In addition, in parts it’s quite slow and takes time to get to the point but when it does up the ante it becomes a really good watch. A piece of advice, when watching, stick right till the end (otherwise what’s the point), there’s a nice plot twist that brings everything together and wraps the whole movie nicely.

Miss Sloane has a Goliath v David type of feel to it with the latter including a feisty and formidable woman who weaves her magic and bag of tricks to outsmart their formidable opponent. Will it appeal to everyone? Probably not but for the proper movie fan it’s worth a watch. Miss Sloane gets a cool 3 out of 5 rating.