★★☆☆☆

Given my two star review you probably expect me to empty my colon on Daughter of the Wolf. Well, that isn’t going to happen. Daughter of the Wolf is a bad movie with some phenom acting. If you want to have a lesson in why kids who watch super hero movies should not be allowed to write scripts for real life, this is it.

Richard Dreyfuss gives a phenom performance as “father.” Seriously, I think I put the movie on my rental list just because he was in it. For the first third of the movie you can’t really tell if he is going to turn out to be a good guy or a bad one.

Gina Carano doesn’t give a half-bad performance as a single-mom, former military, trying to get her son back. The hand to hand fight scenes are mostly believable and not too over the top.

Where this movie fails

This is not a super hero movie so they should not have went down that road. In the early part of the movie she falls through the ice on a frozen lake, gets pulled out, manages to find trapper lean-to to build fire while drying cloths. Given they had started with her coming home from the military for a funeral, that wasn’t so over the top. If you don’t know trappers create lean-tos in the mountains near where they trap, you might have been lost.

At this point in the movie they were still trying to keep it real-ish. Later they have her fall off the edge of a waterfall straight through the center of the ice plume/funnel. She washes up down stream and her hair appears dry. Despite the fact it is winter with lots of snow on the ground, she is not frozen.

We do not know how far down stream she floated. What we do know is that somehow, on foot, she beats the woman who has her son and a snowmobile back to the abandoned ski lodge much further up the mountain.

A nice extra

Gina Carano has this ability to give a domineering stare straight into the camera. Supposedly she is staring down a black wolf. Growing up rural I know some people have a connection to wildlife and animals in general from birth. It just exists. I don’t question it when I see it.

Somehow this, and the killing of a wolf by the kidnappers, makes the wolves her “allies” in this affair. If they would have stuck to that story and cut out the whole chase-her-down-the-mountain then drop her through an ice plume, this would have been at least a three star movie. Possibly four.

Summary

This movie failed with the script. It could have been fixed in post-edit by cutting out the chunk where the story completely jumped the shark. Perhaps they would have had to shoot a filler scene to link points A and B in the story? Maybe they could have just salvaged it off the cutting room floor?

Yes I gave this movie two stars. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch it. Both of the actors I mention here gave great performances. They really gave it their all. The script and the producer were where this movie failed. They could re-cut this movie to make it more appealing.

For more movie rental ideas please see list one and list two.