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Review: Daughter of the Wolf

In Daughter of the Wolf, Richard Dreyfuss plays a grizzled backwoods patriarch whose family is made up of those he has kidnapped over the years. To retrieve what he believes to be an outstanding debt from a dead colleague, he kidnaps the grandson Anton Gillis-Adelman (Holly Hobbie, Clarice). This leaves his mom (Gina Carano) to retrieve the ransom for her teenage boy. The villainous family make the mistake of double-crossing her. The title comes from being able to hold eye contact with a wolf despite being in a vulnerable situation, which happens a couple of times. Gina Carano in most of the movie may seem stoic, but what other disposition should she have trying to save her son from crazy people?
Speaking of which, don't be discouraged if the rating on Amazon is less than 5 out of ten. I suspect that following the virtual swarming of hashtag activists through much of 2020 and leading to her Lucasfilm contract as Marshall Cara Dune not being renewed by Lucasfilm's more misguided faction, it is highly likely that the same sort of nitwits that called for her firing - because she would not cram her obvious gender pronouns beside her name on Twitter. beep/bop/boop. (And no, sharing a post from the Holocaust museum was just the surface reason Lucasfilm's Star Wars Twitter account defamed her. It was that like many action heroes, Carano turned out to lean Republican. As a result, now I feel compelled to look for all of her work. I have had Haywire by Stephen Sodderberg since its release on DVD. I did not follow MMA fights, but I enjoyed her in Deadpool and I liked her character Cara Dune in the Star Wars series The Mandalorian. I just hope Kathleen Kennedy's chickens come home to roost as Disney tires of pandering to the lunatic fringe. Jon Favreau's overall plan included Gina's own series spin-off Rangers of the New Republic. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ As for this movie, it has a good pace and even Dreyfuss has a scene that intentionally made me laugh - the sort of thing only a villain can get away with. When a wolf is cornering the boy, Dreyfuss swings his rifle like a bat and knocks the wolf over a cliff ! You just hear its mournful sound tapering off. There is a snowmobile chase where a couple of shots gave away the digital media in close-ups. There is a fight near a frozen waterfall between two women that might have been expected to be the big set-piece, but the same cut-away shots are repeated and the fight felt like it was either censored or otherwise compromised and piecemeal. The climactic confrontation and rescue are actually quite entertaining and had a couple of "Yes!" moments where something satisfying happens to a baddie. The running time is just over an hour and twenty-two minutes, though I have noticed it free on another platform where the file is padded to 1:30 by repeating the opening after end credits.