Daughter of the Wolf stars Gina Carino as Liam Neeson in Taken meets The Grey. When her son gets kidnapped, she will do anything to get him back. Richard Dreyfuss plays Father, the head of the kidnappers. They demand a ransom, but is this kidnapping personal? If it is personal, why did they not know that mama was a vet?
If you need to fill your prescription for chicks kicking butt vitamins and nothing more, Daughter of the Wolf is for you. There is not a high point that people do not jump off from then survive. Carino does the Arnold Schwarzenegger one arm pump shot gun thing. There are some great action sequences involving chase sequences with snowmobiles, cars and on foot in a frozen wasteland. The denouement is evocative and cool. There are wolves who randomly team up with Carino because the kidnappers violate a rule, or the wolves get the whole primal mommy thing. Maybe they are tired of Father gentrifying the neighborhood and appreciate that on a normal day, Carino stays out of their woods plus she is helping them clean up the neighborhood. The quicker that she gets her kid, the quicker that she will leave. Win win.
If you are looking for a great story, Daughter of the Wolf is adequate, but if the writers had spent a little more time fleshing out the story, this film could have been elevated. Alien and Terminator did not initially seem like classics, but with a working class back drop and stories that captured the zeitgeist of underlying anxieties over technological advancements without accompanying ethics evolving alongside, these movies buried themselves deep in our imagination that while our minds could do the impossible, our reckless actions would hurl us back to a time when we were reduced to the limits of our bodies and easy prey.
Daughter of the Wolf had that potential though it touched on different themes. There is the underdeveloped idea of treacherous business practices having generational impact, and considering that the mill is the starting point of the film, it was clearly intended to explain the motivation of the entire movie. I know nothing about hard physical labor, but even though it is called a mill, it seemed as if they were loggers. So if they were loggers, it may explain why the wolves do not like Father though it does not necessarily explain why they invited Carino to the cookout. This connection could make the film a nature takes revenge against man, meaning human beings and the gender, literally. Also Carino’s character, in spite of driving gas guzzling vehicles, has no interest in financially claiming her legacy as a destroyer of nature. I wish that the story fleshed out the theme of the sins of the father, and the relationship between Carino’s character’s father and Father because Father is a liar so we cannot take his perspective as an accurate accounting of the past.
Daughter of the Wolf also seems to be interested in the cycle of toxic masculinity. There is a battle for the soul of the son, the third generation. Father seems to be consciously trying to work a little Stockholm Syndrome magic. Considering the son’s rocky relationship with his mother, it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that he will align himself with Father, especially since it appears that Father has a lot of grudges, and his alias may be Rumpelstiltskin. Father may have recruited his band of menacing men (and one black woman because in real life, she is Gina Carino’s friend and a woman of action) similarly by taking them as children, turning them against their mothers and forming a cult of personality. It vaguely reminded me of Last Rampage, a story of a father and three sons committing pyrrhic criminal acts together against the sons’ better judgment because he wills it, but Last Rampage did it better whereas these men and woman were too grown to convincingly want to spend their entire lives with their evil dad. Also who pays for the electricity at their abandoned ski lodge hideout? Points deducted for no The Shining references. I do not even think that it crossed the filmmakers’ minds. The theme of evil men raising boys and a world without mothers could have worked, but it was only raised to show that Carino was one bad mother….shut your mouth without tackling the theme of motherhood in a provocative manner as Terminator and Alien did. What a missed opportunity! The film should have answered the question of the morality of violence.
There is one unintentionally hilarious moment where one of Father’s henchmen, Larsen, clearly has qualms over the plan. I kept imagining him talking to his kidnap brothers, “Hey, I’ll kidnap a kid in exchange for money, physically hurt his mother, but I draw the line at murder.” Also in a weird way, his character felt more like a natural protagonist than Carino’s though I am not suggesting that Carino should not be the protagonist, but this dude’s storyline was the most complete one in Daughter of the Wolf. The writers committed the rookie mistake of opening with the how we got here trope then did flashbacks later on instead of simply telling her story in chronological order, which did not help.
Daughter of the Wolf’s promoters may not have intended to make the whole enterprise seem vaguely supernatural, but the thought that it could be attracted me to the movie. There is a vague nature spiritualism to the whole story, but like the aforementioned themes, the filmmakers never do more than suggest it. Combined with the ski lodge, the generational misuse of the land soaked with the blood of innocents and the wolf intervention, a supernatural angle could have tied the whole story together in a neater bow than anything I suggested earlier. Am I tropey? It felt weird for all these descendents of European settlers to have grudges and not a single Native American was sitting in the corner coughing silently and shaking their head at the audacity. “You feel wronged because of some money and a business shutting down, Get comfortable. Let me tell you a story.”
How was the acting? Carino is no Zoe Bell, but she is miles above Lady Bloodfight acting skills so she is getting there. No offense intended, but if Jensen Ackles was not comfortably counting his stacks of money from decades of televisions work from Dark Angel to Supernatural, he would have made a perfect Larsen because you need a lovable scoundrel in that role. Dreyfuss has bills to pay and is not getting better job offers so he hams it up all over the place. This role is the kind of job that Rutger Hauer would take and singlehandedly make a B movie into a cult hit, but Dreyfuss is not used to the demotion so while he did a good job chewing the scenery, it is nothing so unique and memorable that another actor could not improve upon his work. At this stage in the game, you want to be the weird old guy that they hire because you come from left field and do something unexpected in a thankless job. Fassbender knows.
Action lovers should definitely check out Daughter of the Wolf. I heard that Carino may or may not have recently said something not on the side of the angels so don’t judge for me for still following her work. Dear actors, don’t let 2020 get in between you and a paycheck, especially if you are punching down. The establishment does not need your help and will not hire you. Look at Chachi.
