DAUGHTER OF THE WOLF
Directed by: David Hackl
Starring: Gina Carano, Richard Dreyfuss, Brendan Fehr, Sydelle Noel, Brock Morgan, Anton Gillis-Adelman
Following the death of her father, Clair Hamilton inherits a bag load of cash and a whole load of problems. Not only is she struggling to reconcile with her estranged teen son, Charlie, but also finds herself embroiled in a family vendetta when a man known only as Father kidnaps Charlie and demands the inheritance as ransom…
Daughter of the Wolf Is a very solid action thriller which has one or two notes to it to make it stand out. Unfortunately the current notoriety of its star is going to make it stand out for the wrong reasons.
This film kicks off in a very surprising manner. The kidnapping of Charlie has already occurred and Clair is about to make the bag drop with some of the kidnappers. I was really caught off guard and expecting my worst fear to be realised - that this scene was in-media-res and we were going to get a dreaded "X Days earlier…" caption. Instead the film barrels on through the credits and lets the full scene and subsequent chase continue uninterrupted.
This is great storytelling - we know everything we need to, there is no need to go further back. Instead the film allows the characters to convey exposition while not slowing down the film. Straight to the action in an earned fashion. That is not to say we don't get any backstory - there are flash-backs to Clair's father's funeral and short scenes showing the current tensions between herself and Charlie. However the film knows we've seen all of this before so it gives us the shorthand version.
While I was more than happy with this structure, unfortunately a lot of the dialogue itself is by the numbers. We've seen iterations of Clair in other films and when she tells her captive Larson that she couldn't look at her son without seeing his father in him, I felt a real sense of déjà vu. The film's antagonist, on the other hand, is a whole other story.
It’s unclear what the full relationship between Clair's father and…Father…was but we learn enough about Father's ways. Larson explains how Father had murdered his own dad and taken he and his mother as virtual slaves. Eventually Larson's mother escapes and leaves him there (although there is more to that late in the film). When asked by Clair why he never tried to escape himself, Larson shrugs and asks where he could have run to. His whole world view was tainted by being part of Father's clan and the sense that that was the only place he belonged. We get to see this in real time with Charlie, Clair's son. He already has an antagonistic relationship with Clair and the fact she's been absent for most of his life. When Father starts telling him that she's abandoned him again (along the lines of if she was going to rescue him she would have been there by now), you can see the seeds of doubt and fear being sewn.
Richard Dreyfuss is well-cast as Father. He brings a level of intensity and animal cunning to the role. He's not one of these bad-guys who has every contingency mapped out, he's having to wing it a lot because he hadn't expected Clair to be so formidable. However as mentioned above he has a tried and tested method of working and his "family" are all loyal to his way of life. Gina Carano is very able as Clair. She has a certain bitterness and air of regret when she starts to look back on her decisions such as leaving behind Charlie to do another army tour. As usual she is also very able with the physical demands of the role.
There is a lot of good, solid action throughout the film. The opening money drop escalates into a decent shootout and car chase, Clair takes a number of tumbles into rivers and Father's clan gets attacked by wolves. The landscape is stunning, in particular a waterfall which has created a cauldron of ice at its bottom (that Clair naturally falls into!). Director David Hackl is no stranger to action movies, having previously made the very enjoyable Enter The Grizzly Maze and Life on the Line.
THE VERDICT
There is an elephant in the room that needs to be acknowledged, at least. Actress Gina Carano has been in the spotlight for espousing some tasteless opinions which may have cost her dearly, including being very publicly fired from The Mandalorian. However, regardless of what her future may hold, it cannot be denied that she has a strong screen presence and works well within the confines of this story. The film delivers a fair amount of well-shot action and while some of the characters were a bit one-note, the narrative structure works really well. Daughter of the Wolf is a very decent survival/action movie and worth seeing.