My compliments from me to you, Hollywood, for this, your most delicious irony. MMA superstar Gina Carano may have had her first leading role in a movie from Academy Award-winner Steven Soderbergh, but it wasn’t until she starred a cautionary tale about ziplines that she was actually asked to act.
Gina Carano is not a bad actor by the way, it’s just not her wheelhouse yet. Steven Soderbergh’s efficient feminist thriller Haywire worked around her limitations, asking her to be a steely, ass-kicking canvas on which the mostly male cast could project their expectations, so that when she defied them it truly was glorious. She has presence, that’s for damned sure, and when she starts beating the hell out of everyone Gina Carano is a damn near force of nature, but she doesn’t quite look comfortable playing this cheery newlywed with a complex, tortured past.
In the Blood stars Gina Carano as a honeymooner whose husband (Cam Gigandet) falls prey to a tragic ziplining accident, but instead of going directly to an emergency room, his ambulance disappears. Trapped on a tropical island with a corrupt police force (led by Luis Guzman) and j’accused of offing her own husband by his asshole father (Treat Williams), she’s forced to take the law into her own hands in order to find her true love and either save his life or avenge his murder. The process involves a lot of badass fight sequences – well played, Ms. Carano – and at least one more use of ziplining, this time as an elaborate interrogation method.
The set-up is almost Hitchcock: a bourgeois stranger in a strange land, forced to play hero when beset by paranoid circumstance. The execution is straight to video schlock: an excuse for an MMA fighter to wail on one thug after another. The set-up requires Gina Carano to play an everywoman, someone just like us who finds themselves suddenly out of their depth. But the execution is forced to shoehorn in some crazy backstory about her half-mad father (Stephen Lang) training her to kill from puberty onwards just to justify how this blushing bride can suddenly turn into Steven Seagal when the plot unexpectedly calls for it.
Keeping this bizarre character straight would be a chore for an experienced thespian, so kudos to Gina Carano for even half getting away with it. She looks comfortable killing street thugs and she looks at least happy to be playing a normal human the rest of the time, even if the movie runs constant cartwheels to make her seem anything but normal.
Bikini thrillmeister John Stockwell (Into the Blue, Dark Tide, Turistas) once again seems to be making an entire film as an excuse to hang out on the beach and surf his heart out, but this time he at least seems invested in making In the Blood feel like a real, old fashioned suspense movie, with high stakes, overwhelming odds and a handful of real moral compromises. The simple story can’t quite carry the weight of his seriousness, however, and it feels too long at 108 minutes, the victim of way too much set up and red herrings that prove far more interesting than the mystery’s final, bonkers solution. But when it finally gets going and just lets Gina Carano whup some ass in the middle of a discotheque it’s actually quite a bit of fun.
The lesson here is: don’t fuck with Gina Carano, don’t undermine a perfectly good story with dumbass excuses to kick butt, and whatever you do, don’t ever, ever go ziplining.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
