Lila and Eve stars Viola Davis and Jennifer Lopez. I wanted so much to absolutely love it because of the two stars. How often do you get to see a film with Viola Davis and Jennifer Lopez as the lead characters? Or any women of color?
Despite the performances of the two leads, the film itself was on the weak side. I wanted it to be great. It wasn’t.
Lila and Eve is about grieving mothers whose children have been murdered.
As the film opens we see Lila’s (Davis) son Stephon (Aml Ameen) killed in a drive-by shooting because he happened to be walking down the street at the wrong moment.
Lila begins attending a grief support group, where Eve (Lopez) shows up.
The police, played by Shea Whigham and Andre Royo don’t try very hard to find out what happened. Eve encourages Lila to seek revenge herself. And she does.
Perhaps it was the male writer and director, but I just wasn’t seeing what I thought was real for grieving mothers. More annoyingly, the film’s secret was obvious from the start.
On the plus side, there were some suspenseful moments, some tense scenes. The work between Davis and Lopez was always interesting.
There are a lot of films in my Netflix and Amazon Prime history that I abandoned after the first 5 minutes. This isn’t one of them. I stuck with Lila and Eve because I wanted to see how it ended, so I was engaged enough in the film. Overall, however, it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped or as it could have been.