SnapVibe

Everly

Running time: 92 minutes. Rated R (strong violence, language).

Why, Salma Hayek? Why?

Before you actually see the 48-year-old actress in “Everly,” you hear her being gang-raped, and this sub-sub-Tarantino gore-fest is all downhill from there. Its trailer bills it as a girl-power action movie, which is some impressively false advertising: This is nothing but nasty, misogynist torture porn.

I spent part of the running time wondering if the filmmakers were actually holding one of Hayek’s relatives hostage. Why else would this veteran actor, women’s rights activist and wife of a billionaire take a role as a sex slave who suffers 90 minutes of abuse — and bon mots like “That’s a lot of dead whores” — before collapsing in a bloody heap? This is a part you’d possibly agree to when just starting out in the business, having no better options and eager to eat something other than ramen. But Hayek? Come on.

Her titular character has been imprisoned for years by a sadistic Yakuza boss (Hiroyuki Watanabe) when she gets a gun and makes a break for freedom. But a threat to the lives of her mother and daughter stops her, so she waits for them to come to her for escape money instead, while dispatching a steady stream of bad guys.

The film’s single setting functions as a gladiatorial stadium for the viewer; here, Everly faces down challengers like the Sadist (Togo Igawa), who tortures her with battery acid while forcing her to watch her mother drink poison. Shortly thereafter, we switch to the POV of Everly’s tiny daughter, hidden in a closet, as another woman is gruesomely murdered, then watch the child wobble down a hallway followed by a man brandishing a bloody meat cleaver.

When director Joe Lynch (“Knights of Badassdom”) isn’t smirkingly placing a toddler in horrific scenarios, he’s offering up a parade of scantily clad, soon-to-be dead women. And when his camera’s not snuggled up in Hayek’s cleavage as she fires a gun or throws grenades, it’s reveling in the blood oozing out of her taut, bullet-riddled torso.

“Get out or die trying,” says the movie’s motto, which was more or less my impulse while watching it.

ncG1vNJzZmimqaW8tMCNnKamZ2JlfnZ7j2tma21fqK6tucBmn5qxlaDAbrHVnqmlsV2ewG66zq2foqaXYq%2B2wIynmKysqWK6qr%2FOoLCnoaOperW70a2sq51dpbyzuo4%3D