GINA CARANO is a former mixed martial arts champion who became an actress and did action films like “Haywire”, “Fast & Furious 6”, “Deadpool” and “Daughter of the Wolf”.
She now co-produces her new movie, “Terror on the Prairie”, a western which is usually associated with men like John Wayne and Gary Cooper, but now with a woman in the lead.
Gina plays Hatti McAllister, who lives with her husband Jeb (UFC champ Donald Cerrone), son Will (Rhys Becker) and their baby daughter in a remote and isolated ranch in Montana.
Homestead life in a farm where you tend to your own animals and draw water from a well is difficult, specially for Hattie who grew up in the city of St. Louis in Missouri.
She’s long been trying to convince her husband for them to move to the city but he won’t hear of it.
Jeb had to leave them to do some business in the town and while Hattie is alone with their two kids in the farm, a group of four bandits come along.
Their leader is known as the Captain (Nick Searcy), a former officer of the Confederate Army in the American Civil War who is fond of quoting the Bible.
He is nice and pleasant at the start, just asking for some water. One of his men is Gabriel Kane Day-Lewis, son of Daniel Day-Lewis and French actress Isabelle Adjani.
Hattie is so hospitable she even offers them an entire meal. But eventually, Hattie realizes they are outlaws so she gets her shotgun, orders them to leave all their guns on her table and stay away from her property.
They comply, but of course, it’s easy to deduce that they will return to try kill Hattie and her kids.
This starts Hattie’s valiant one-woman defense to protect her brood against the bad guys who want to invade their cabin.
This is Carano’s first movie where she doesn’t use her karate chops and kicks but instead, performs a lot of gunplay as an asskicking frontierwoman who needs to take all the pesky bad guys by her lonesome self.
Since she’s all alone and there are four of them (although one would side with her later), she has to be very resourceful in improvising on how to fight them off.
The movie lags after a while because of the extended stand off between Hattie and her adversaries.
In many sequences, she just shoots and shoots and shoots at them, but never get to hit her targets, unnecessarily prolonging the film’s running time.
Those who have seen faster-paced versions of Wilid West gun plays will surely get bored by the sluggish pacing and the fact that it’s not so bloody.
Its director, Michael Polish (“Twin Falls Idaho”) obviously has no intentions of following in the footsteps of classic western directors like John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone or Clint Eastwood.
But the film’s cinematography captures the panoramic natural wonders of Montana’s mountain scenery.
