I appreciate Lila and Eve’s effort to take the plight of grieving mothers seriously. The best revenge movies do address the complexities of seeking revenge, and even then the actual grief of a loss is rarely portrayed in depth. So I’m sorry to report that Lila and Eve ends up being a very superficial version of its high ambitions.
Lila (Viola Davis)’s son Stefon is gunned down in a drive by. At a support group for mothers who have lost children to violence, Lila meets Eve (Jennifer Lopez), a fellow mother who helps her go after the people responsible for killing her son. That means getting a gun and going after low level dealers to work their way up the chain.
For all the care and attention given to Lila and the support group, the script is filled with one-dimensional characters. Davis can make it work, but other actors are stuck with stock archetypes like a jaded cop (Andre Royo) who doesn’t care about the murders, a by the books cop (Shea Whigham) who wants to see justice done even to sympathetic victims, and a group of grieving mothers who also play token parts. Even the one who represents mothers who lose their grip on reality, while sympathetic, is a complete one-note conception of such a complex coping mechanism.
We’ve all seen enough revenge movies to know that it’s not as simple as just killing the bad guys. Violence begets more violence, there can be collateral damage, etc. There’s just no complexity to Lila and Eve going up the chain of criminals. They get a name, then another name, and then the last name. I mean, good detective work, especially manipulating the crooks they killed, but it’s still a very simple linear path.
The procedural element on the cops’ side is too lame to feel like a threat to Lila. The cops make Columbo references, and complain about forensics taking too long to get to the crime scene. It’s no better when Lila makes Denzel Washington references in two different scenes, because… Denzel Washington is the cool black celebrity to whom grieving black mothers turn for comfort?
You care about Lila. You want to see her plan work. You just wish it had a little more sophistication about it. The idea of a mother of one of the dealers attending the support group is worth exploring, but it only results in a collection of soundbites from the other mothers. There is some scary violence that is effective, and some surprises, but the bones of the story are still superficial.
Since Lifetime Films/A&E produced this feature, they really kind of served it up for me. It’s a Lifetime movie with an A-list cast, which essentially makes it a Lifetime movie because they get A-list actors now.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
