Armed forces vet who’s a single mom chases crooks who have kidnapped her son in a tepid action vehicle for MMA star Gina Carano.
Thirty years ago Daughter of the Wolf would have been found in the action-adventure aisle at Blockbuster, somewhere near Cynthia Rothrock and Shannon Tweed. Daughter of the Wolf may aim higher than those old Cannon and Concorde straight-to-video titles, but the results are too lackluster to merit much attention.
One-time MMA champ Gina Carano began her film career with a small role in the direct-to-DVD Blood and Bone before Steven Soderbergh highlighted her in the hard-hitting Haywire. Since then Carano’s alternated between supporting gigs in high-profile pictures like Fast & Furious 6 and Deadpool and less-celebrated outings like Kickboxer: Vengeance and Scorched Earth.
Daughter of the Wolf takes place in wintry mountains of British Columbia, with Carano returning from service in the Middle East to take over her family’s lumber business. First she has to rescue her teen son, kidnapped by Oscar-winner Richard Dreyfus and his gang of foster-home rejects. (Frail and shrunken, Dreyfus snarls like an elderly Mickey Rooney.)
Why things happen in this genre doesn’t matter as much as how. Ridiculous plot twists can pass by smoothly as long as the action works. Even so, Daughter of the Wolf (written by Nika Agiashvlli) makes strikingly little sense. Stand-offs are interrupted by witless shootings, cars crash into each other for no reason, and Carano’s character blunders through the plot without any apparent idea of what she will do next.
Most of the film is a chase through the mountains, Carano and a wounded kidnapper (Brendan Fehr) chasing Dreyfuss and his gang to an abandoned ski resort. This is Wind River territory, thankfully without that film’s pretensions, but also without much of a story line. The plot requires Carano to not just fall through the surface of a frozen lake, but later to fall off a waterfall into icy white water. She would survive neither accident in real life, but as the title suggests, she is protected in some way by her totem wolf.
The action and violence are disappointingly tamped down, gore the result of the pack of wolves prowling around the leads. (Daughter earns its R mostly through cigarettes and curse words.) The fights aren’t choreographed especially well, and they’re shot and edited in rough quick cuts that disguise Carano’s skills. She is a solid performer with real screen presence, but jobs like this don’t help her career.
Those Cannon and Concorde straight-to-video titles turned out okay at times, occasionally earning after-midnight slots on Cinemax. More often than not were just money grabs that didn’t fool anyone.
