Linux-fueled Thoughts Unhinged

Look, I'm not about to make a ralphthemoviemaker rant video on why Gina Carano is awful in Daughter of the Wolf — i.e., making a 20 minute to 1 hour video of criticism when it could've all been done in 5 minutes.

Like, I could just rewatch an episode of Mr. Robot, Utopia, or a bunch of pre-2014 videos from Ryan Higa in that amount of time.

Or that I could easily turn this into a “In Defense of Haywire” rant.

You know the movie is horrible when it's freely available in its entirety on YouTube... and somehow the YouTube/Google/Alphabet neural network AI hasn't taken the film down. (I'm pretty sure the YouTube channel that uploaded the movie doesn't have proper rights to the film, but I could be wrong. Though, also as a disclaimer, don't be surprised if the movie's gone by the time you read this 3 years from now. The comment section is full of objectively stupid people gassing this movie up.)

(However, Run from 2013 or Buster's Mal Heart are not examples of bad movies that deserve to be uploaded onto YouTube. For the former, I'll stan for anything Narnia-related... and Prince Caspian — well, the actor that went on to play Prince Caspian in the early 2010s Narnia series; and for the latter, there's no way this indie film Rami Malek starred in was ever going to make bank in its DVD sales — since the film was the premise everyone expected Mr. Robot to have back during S2.)

Here are the main points of criticism, because I simply fast forwarded with my right arrow key and was hardly compelled to actually stop and watch if there wasn't any stupid violence happening:

• Carano is even more invincible than she was in Haywire — it's like she has plot armor thicker than a protagonist in a children's TV show. She should be close to death IRL every time she falls into the Artic cold water, but somehow she just takes her jacket off to dry and gets back to walking in the snow in what feels like fewer than 10 minutes.
• There's this unwilling guy that ultimately gets killed at the end of the movie. I kind of hated this character because you could tell that he was literally only being dragged around so that he could die for Carano's character at the very end of the story.
• I was expecting some competent villains, like in Haywire that offered a bit of challenge or were even remotely despicable. However, I just kept scratching my head, because the people involved looked like they were more incompetent than the people involed in the Pizza Collar Bomb case.
• The old man in charge was just petty, not even close to a mastermind or a competent guy, let alone villain. I have no idea why Carano's character couldn't kill the old guy and all of his minions the first time Carano fights the old guy — other than to pad out the movie time so that the running time could be feature length for a U.S. audience.
• The boy's outrage burst made no sense when he's lock in the inner cabin, because his captors weren't doing anything to him the whole time. Only “Marv” (because the minion who who should've died the first time he got attacked by wolves, kind of looks like Marv from the original Home Alone movies) dealt the most intimidation towards the boy, and “Marv” was pathetic.
• The black woman minion wasn't even competent, so I don't know how the black woman minion even threw off Carano from the top of an icy waterfall cliff. (Also, Carano probably should've died, or at least critically injured, unless some expert jumper wants to disagree with convincing proof.)
• What is the point of the old man torturing the “not evil” minion with a white-hot fireplace poker? It seems extremely cruel for no reason, but it's a turn off. It's not even a Saw-level of interesting. It's like how Sam Esmail said that editing professional porn actually turns you off in an NPR interview. It's like the old man could've killed a puppy and I wouldn't have cared a bit at all because this movie makes you so desensitized to feeling anything. (Not by overwhelming you like in Saw movies, but out of pure apathy.)
  • Meanwhile, I can hardly rewatch the scene where Lee takes out Wilson's eye in S1E1 of Utopia because it's so brutal and Utopia had no budget at all.
• Carano's character should've been able to kill all of the “evil” characters easily during the second confrontation, instead of somehow struggling.
• The simp guy that ended up being a body shield for Carano's character was simply not psychologically tortured enough. I would've like to see some sort of psychological horror, like from The Shining (since this did take place in a snowy area). At least that would have made this movie slightly interesting, even if it'd be derivative. Either make the movie as tense with a “Here's Johnny!” climax, or cut out the body shield guy for Carano out of the movie. The movie would've been at least 50% shorter and you can literally remove all of the body shield guy's lines and scenes, yet the story would've made sense!
• The old man's motivation seems pretty petty and convoluted — I think a heist movie like Panic Room starring Kristen Stewart as a child with her mother in a vault makes for a much more compelling heist than whatever exposition the old man was muttering about. Like, does he have constant tiredness or what, like Steven Segal?
• Finally, what the deal with the wolves? Is there an entirely cut section of the movie that explained why Carano's character has distant wolf allies? The physically distant wolf allies had no relation with Carano's character history in the armed services. Like, did she save some wolves while on active duty and now some unseen wolf deity is her guardian angel for the rest of her life or something? You should've put this in the movie, so at least we could know why the wolves are even there — because otherwise the wolves themselves have no reason to be in the movie.
  • I think we can all agree that this movie script was not read aloud to even a fifth grader for even structural story feedback. This movie was written by someone less intelligent than an illiterate high school student. I'm sure Carano gave her best, but there's only so much an actor or actress can do with a bad script. This was because she was decent enough in Haywire. Carano has none of the range and depth like Carly Chankin, who plays Darlene in Mr. Robot, but I have realistic expectations for Carano's background as an MMA fighting champion. (Also, it's an entirely different matter when a script is good but the actors and/or actresses are bad — sounds like there was an unresolved systemic issue in the casting direction... and so on.)
    • I think Carano should've been cast in a buddy cop-type movie as the strong, direct, and almost uncompromising counterpart of the pair, but I don't think she'll be doing much acting after getting cancelled by Disney for her coronavirus opinions after Season 2 of The Mandelorian. I think people shouldn't get medical advice from celebrities (and I don't have to defend Carano), but then again most people are too stupid to ever realize that fact for themselves.
      • Man, these Disney sheeple need to wake up and realize Daddy Disney is marketed as liberal but is more conservative than most people in South Carolina, just like Apple (which means you maximize both your public image and your profit margins!). (Why do you think Disney bought Fox? Ok, I know technically Disney didn't buy Fox's TV entities and only the movie related ones, but they're close enough, am I right?)

Conclusion

Instead, all of this makes me want to watch Malignant by James Wan (which is proof that Wan is talented when he's not typecast in adjacent film franchise work not that far away from the Saw series).

If Malignant is the little known hidden gem of a 1980s horror film you'd accidentally find in the back of a Blockbuster, then I'm all for a totally hinged campy horror film!