ORBzine - Girls Kick Ass! Movie Reviews
The 355 (2022)
Elijah Clarke (Jason Flemyng -
Primeval
), a major financier of international crime,
attempts to obtain a super-weapon.
This is a computer program that can hack any system on Earth,
allowing the user to control any system that is online.
Airplanes and electricity grids will become vulnerable.
To make this the ultimate McGuffin,
the program will delete itself if anyone attempts to copy it.
In other words, there can only ever be one unit -
contained in a single physical hard drive.
Top CIA Agent Mace Browne ( Jessica Chastain ) and her partner - in both senses - Nick Fowler (Sebastian Stan - Captain America: Winter Soldier ) get sent to Paris to buy the McGuffin. Unfortunately Marie Schmidt ( Diane Kruger ), working for an allied Agency, interferes. Stan gets fridged like in Destroyer (2018) to motivate the female protagonist. She gets a new partner, MI6 agent Kadijah Adiyeme ( Lupita Nyongo ), and they go after the McGuffin again.
Mace organises her international rivals into a diverse team of kick-ass women. A Columbian psychiatrist, Graciela Rivera ( Penelope Cruz ), gets dragged into the mission. They even get a Chinese assassin, Lin Mi Sheng ( Bingbing Fan ), to make certain everyone is represented. That said, the team has diverse skills and personalities so they are actually functional. For example, Kadiyah is the tech support girl who ends up in an air vent - like Luthor in Mission Impossible . Yes, this is an all-female IMF.
While they show individual skills at spycraft, when it comes to the violence they all (except for Graciela) are interchangeably uber-competent. The action scenes are okay at best. There are a couple of chase scenes which show characters running through crowded areas while waving a pistol in the air. John Wick 2 did it better. Later on there are a lot of explosions, and Mason gets a slug-fest fight that is nowhere near as good as the one in Atomic Blonde (2017) . All in all, a mediocre action movie that is only set apart by the gender of the protagonists and let down by the occasional girl-power bit.
Mason's character development is one sticking point. She starts off as blindly loyal to the CIA. When a supposedly villainous character monologues her about their corruption, she ignore him. This is despite the fact that she spent the previous four years enforcing the foreign policy of Donald Turnip. Later, when she and the others in her team are each disavowed by their respective Agency, she is more than happy for the team to become an asset for the PRC. Hopefully there will be a sequel, when the 355 are the villains in a US/China confrontation. Despite this film making the PRC look like the good guys, Beijing refused it distribution in China because the token Chinese actress had tax problems.
9 Bullets (2022)
The protagonist (
Lena Headey
) is a burlesque dancer,
as well as the ex-lover of the local mayor (Sam Worthington -
Clash of the Titans
). He is also the boss of the local crime syndicate,
so when someone steals millions of dollars from him
his response is to send his trio of redneck thugs
to kill the thief's entire family.
Headey ends up hiding the thief's son. The mayor wants the boy, presumably to tie up loose ends by removing the only witness to the massacre.
Headey and the boy go on the run. Just as the main villains are all male, the people that help the fugitives are female. Headey's mentor Lucy ( Barbara Hershey ) is prime among them.
The protagonist (
Aeon Flux (2005)
Charlize Theron
is the title character, a super-powered assassin in a futuristic city.
The Government is a dictatorship, so she helps the rebels by bumping off hard targets.
She is assigned to terminate The Chairman (rent-a-villain Marton Csokas -
Kingdom of Heaven
). But she discovers that everything she believes is founded on a tissue of lies ...
Aeon is pursued by the Rebels and the security forces. Can they escape alive?
This is a mediocre Sci-Fi shoot'em-up. It is nice to see Theron in action (usually Milla Jovovich got this kind of work, although Angelina Jolie has done some action-girl flicks as well). Also, Csokas gets to show more depth and range than his usual snarling thug.
Alita: Battle Angel (2019)
This was written by
James Cameron
and directed by
Robert Rodriguez
, and has many of the hallmarks of their work.
It features a strong female lead, and Latina actors in main roles.
Not to mention massive amounts of CGI and green-screen,
although it is perfectly blended with the live-action players.
The story is set three hundred years after the Fall - an apocalyptic event that we later find out was caused by an interplanetary war. Now, the main city floats over a massive trash dump - like the Martian city in Mars Needs Moms . Worse, a slum city has grown up on the edge of the trash dump.
One day a mechanic (Christoph Waltz - Green Hornet ) is scavenging on the trash pile when he discovers a disused android. Real Steel , anyone? This android resembles a young girl, so he patches her up and calls her Alita. She has amnesia, so she goes along with it.
The slum is filled with full-body cyborgs. Some of them go full-on cyber-psycho, like Eiza Gonzales ). Others are targeted by thieves, because their cyber implants are valuable (like in Repo Men ).
Alita signs up as a bounty-hunter, then tries to win the support of the others by insulting them and starting a bar-room brawl. So much for keeping a low profile. Brute force and ignorance seem to work, however.
Anna (2019)
The story starts in 1985,
when the KGB decides to warm up the Cold War.
Luke Evans (
The Hobbit
) arrests a group of CIA agents,
who then get made an example of.
Yes, the KGB boss is not interested in Bridge of Spies swaps
and he instead prefers to go full Smiert Spion.
The story moves forward five years. Anna ( Sasha Luss ), a young woman from Moscow, is recruited to become a top international supermodel. She gets a new life in Paris, France.
The story hops around again in time. This happens several more times, in order for double-crosses to be revealed. The movie makes allusions to russian dolls, with a new one always nested inside the others.
Basically, at one point in the story Anna is recruited and trained as an assassin by Helen Mirren . If this all sound a bit familiar, it is ripped directly from La Femme Nikita . However, Luc Besson cannot sue - because he wrote and directed it!
Anna fights like a female John Wick . The strange thing about it is that there are a couple of scenes where there are pistols lying around, but both she and her opponents fight with improvised melee weapons instead.
All in all, this is a decent film. It is an updated Nikita with the style of Wick, but it covers much the same ground as Red Sparrow .
Assassin Next Door, The (2009)
The protagonist (
Olga Kurylenko
) is a ...
The protagonist (
The protagonist (
Atomic Blonde (2017)
The title character (
Charlize Theron
) is given a debriefing by Toby Jones (
Your Highness
). The result is an unnecessarily convoluted tale
filled with nonsensical twists and double-crosses.
The title character is basically a female James Bond. The brutal violence is like something out of Jason Bourne , but she also has the sex drive of 007. The last female action character who could compete with Bond in this area is Barbarella .
The blonde is sent to West Berlin, where she is teamed up with the local British agent (James McAvoy - Wanted ). They team up against the KGB.
Ava (2020)
Ava (
Jessica Chastain
) is a top international assassin.
The protagonist (
Becky (2020)
This starts with a bookend sequence as Becky (
Lulu Wilson
) gets debriefed by cops.
We know that something very bad happened,
and that she is covering up her culpability in it.
The main storyline is told in extended flashback.
Becky's father (Joel McHale - Spy Kids 4 ) took her to like in a Cabin in the Woods with her new stepmother ( Amanda Brugel ). Yes, the blended family storyline is reused from Four Kids And It .
Their non-so-idyllic domestic situation is interrupted by the rude arrival of Dominick (Kevin James - Zookeeper ) and his gang, including Cole (Ryan McDonald - Fringe ). They are White Supremacists, so they occupy the same shorthand-for-pure-evil niche that the comanches filled in the John Wayne westerns, or that zombies and killer robots filled in dystopian scifi stories. That said, the actors do a great job - especially when you consider that they generally play good guys ... and they now play torturers and dog-killers.
The white men just want a key, their mcguffin. In contrast, Becky's motivation is far darker. She is obsessed with revenge, and carries it out in a fashion that takes Home Alone to the level of a full-on torture porn horror movie.
Becky (
Black Crab (2022)
The protagonist (
Noomi Rapace
) is a Special Forces operator.
Black Site (2022)
The protagonist, Abigail Trent (
Michelle Monaghan
), is a CIA Analyst with a personal grudge against Hatchet (Jason Clarke -
Silk Road
) the world's most deadly terrorist.
She even gets posted to the front line of the war of terror -
a secret CIA black site prison known as The Citadel.
And eventually she gets what she wished for.
The Citadel is an underground prison in the Jordanian desert. Sort of a cross between Abu Graib and Camp X-Ray at Gitmo. This was actually filmed in Australia, which explains why security officers Raymond Miller (Jai Courtney - Divergent ) and Darren Wesley (Tod Lasance - Spartacus: War of the Damned ) are played by Australian actors. That said, the prison is meant to involve the Five Eyes network - a real-life alliance between five English-speaking countries ... including Australia itself.
Hatchet escapes and goes on a kill-crazy rampage, bumping off the cast members one at a time. To add some urgency, the failsafe countdown starts. After an hour, the CIA will send a drone to destroy the entire base.
Abby gets to run around in a tight white tee-shirt, looking like the star of a female Die Hard . Ironically, not only did her co-star Courtney appear as the hero's replacement-in-training in A Good Day to Die Hard but he also played the replacement Kyle Reese in Terminator: Genesis alongside rent-a-villain Jason Clarke!
Blue Steel (1990)
Megan Turner (
Jamie Lee Curtis
) is a rookie cop in the New York Police Department.
On her first night on patrol,
she intervenes when Wool Cap (Tom Sizemore -
) uses a .44 magnum revolver to rob a supermarket.
Unfortunately the robber's weapon is not recovered,
so Asst. Chief Stanley Hoyt (Kevin Dunn -
) has to suspend Megan from duty.
The revolver was stolen by one of the witnesses, Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver - Time Cop ). Not only is be a wealthy stockbroker, he is also mentally unbalanced and develops an obsession with Megan. When he starts murdering people, Detective Nick Mann (Clancy Brown - Highlander ) decides to use Megan as bait.
This is a pretty suspenseful film, but it is not a whodunnit. Megan does not have to work out who the killer is - the unbalanced obsessive pretty much tells her. However, his Attorney Mel Dawson (Richard Jenkins - ) is able to keep him out of prison because the unsupported opinion of a suspended cop is not sufficient to charge a man with murder.
The director, Kathryn Bigelow , may be able to handle the action scenes but she delivers a movie with a remarkably empty feel to it. There are very few characters, and everything is about promoting the main storyline - perhaps this is just a particularly heavy-handed example of the pre-Tarantino era. Megan's mother Shirley Turner ( Louise Fletcher ) and her best friend Tracy Perez ( Elizabeth Pena ) both get screen time, but the film does not exactly pass the Bechdel test because they talk a lot about relationships.
Bound (1996)
The protagonist, Corky (
Gina Gershon
), is an ex-convict working as a janitor in an apartment block.
She starts an affair with
Jennifer Tilly
, girlfriend of gangster Joe Pantoliano (
The Matrix
).
Breaking In (2018)
A woman takes her children to stay in an up-scale home
fitted with CCTV cameras and a hidden safe.
Unfortunately some crooks think the place is empty,
and break in to steal some hidden loot.
Yes, this is basically
Panic Room
. The big change is the race swap -
Gabrielle Union
is the female lead in place of
Jodie Foster
, and Billy Burke (
Revolution
) fills a role similar to that of Forest Whitaker (
Black Panther
).
Basically this is a by-the-numbers thriller. The master villain does not have a team of Euro-thugs like in Die Hard . Instead, he had to recruit the dregs from the local county jail-house. One is a nervous rookie, another is a borderline psycho. Yes, all the archetypes are covered. Things go well until the Real Estate Agent ( Christa Miller ) turns up.
In the fifteen years since the original room, it seems that there has not been much improvement in CCTV technology. The security system includes a small drone, but that is about the only update. Similarly, the protagonist has no military-style skills or gear. She has to fumble her way through the encounters, and relies more on luck than actual ability.
The acting performances are decent, but the film is let down by its basic unoriginality.
Call To Spy, A (2019)
In 1941, Vera Atkins (
Stana Katic
) is the private secretary to Buckminister (Linus Roache -
Vikings
). Since Buck is the head of Special Operations Executive,
a British Special Forces unit set up by Winston Churchill,
this gives Vera a lot of power - if not much official authority.
She recruits female agents who are sent behind enemy lines in France,
where they are hunted by both Vichy French police and the Gestapo.
At first, Vera has to pressure her male superiors into accepting women recruits. This is the cliched story of male patriarchy. However, later on the story shifts gear. Because the female agents prove themselves successful, Vera puts her effort into attempting to stop them from being put in even more dangerous situations. Yes, this is the down-side of gender equality ... the removal of privilege that protects females from the burdens that males take for granted.
The film focuses on two female field agents in particular. No, not Violet Szabo and Odette Samson - they both got their biopic movies made in the 1950s. This time it is the turn of Noor Inayat Khan, a Sufi Princess who became a wireless operator, and Virgina Hall - an American woman who has an artificial leg.
Vera has her own special level of oppression to deal with. Not only is she a woman in a man's world, she is also a Romanian Jew in 1940s England. As a result, she has her own private battle to become a naturalised British citizen.
As the lack of big-name stars suggests, this was shot on a TV-show budget. The locations are Pennsylvania and Hungary, not known for big-budget productions, and it is shot as a drama with little suspense or action. Nice if you want to know a bit of history, but not exactly a thrill a minute stuff.
Charlie's Angels (2019)
This is a hatefully bad movie,
twisted far beyond what is normally found in the action thriller genre.
What it does right is limited to about two things.
One is the pairing of a male screenwriter with a female director,
which in principle guarantees fifty percent representation for each gender at writer/director level.
The second is the default casting of brunette women - for the protagonists, at least.
If this had been extended into the villains, the result would be a stronger movie.
The introductory once upon a time section, which used irony to contast the cliche of three little girls with the extreme competence of the strong female protagonists, has been ditched. Instead we get a video montage of young women playing a variety of outdoor pastimes. Yes, this bit is basically an advert for tampons.
The main plot is a lot like the generic Mission: Predictable movies. The new client is a scientist ( Naomi Scott ) who works on a team that has invented a new energy source. This is the McGuffin that the Angels chase around Europe after. Since there are only two Angels, the scientist fills in for the third one.
The scientist is a terrible employee, and the others are terrible human beings. They walk through this generic plot, leaving a trail of unnecessary corpses.
Since Mission: Predictable always involves a betrayal, this follows the same trope. Old Bosley (Patrick Stewart - Star Trek: TNG ) has been forced into early retirement by Girl Bosley ( Elizabeth Banks ). She used to be an Angel, before she got promoted. Now we are reminded that at least one Angel was corrupt - see Charlie's Angels 2: Full Throttle . So is this movie deep enough to have a female villain, or is the term straight man synonymous with bad guy?
The two McG movies, which are still part of this effort's backstory, got humour from comedic homages to famous motion pictures. In contrast, the Banks movie attempts humour through horrendous gender-based violence against men. There are multiple examples of a male character's death being so gruesome and undeserved that it far exceeds the karmic balance. We all recall the mediocre movie Jurassic World , and how the gratuitous death scene of Katie McGrath was called out as being excessive. In contrast, the mainstream has ignored many such similar scenes in this effort.
Charlotte Gray (2001)
Charlotte (
Cate Blanchett
) falls in love with RAF pilot Peter Gregory (Rupert Penry-Jones -
Black Sails
). When he gets shot down behind enemy lines,
she joins Special Operations Executive
and parachutes into France to save him.
Well, that is the romantic version of the story.
The real story is a lot more complicated.
Charlotte is approached by SOE before she meets Peter, and it looks like she was manipulated by them. Her mission is to help the Communist resistance, but for Charles De Gaulle to triumph the SOE must just set the commies and the Vichy against each other. No mention is made as to what kind of communists they are, so Stalin's crimes (including the death of Trotsky) go unmentioned.
This movie was clearly made in a specific time, when Blanchett was straight off the set of Lord of the Rings . Her first scene is aboard a train crossing the Glenfinnan viaduct, best known for the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter film franchise. Later she lodges with Michael Gambon, now instantly recognisable as Dumbledore.
Director Gillian Armstrong does a good job with the novel written by Sebastian Faulks . It is not really a thriller, since there is no single overarching villain. Instead the focus is on personal drama, such as a love triangle with Julien Levade (Billy Crudup - ), the handsome young Communist leader. Also, Charlotte's belief in the importance of Hope is key to the film's climax. In many ways, this is a spiritual twin to Shawshank Redemption .
In the 21st century we must ask ourselves, is this film offensively racist? After all the lead role is played by an Australian playing a Scot pretending to be French. This is Tropic Thunder layers of complexity! In all fairness though, this film is about English-speaking actors who are pretending to be French ... even though they do not actually speak French on-screen. Basically it is a more serious version of 'Allo 'Allo, which was itself a parody of Secret Army. In comparison, Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (2023) is shot in France using actual French people, speaking French with English subtitles.
Close (2019)
The protagonist (
Noomi Rapace
) is a bodyguard, AKA a Close Protection Specialist.
Canary Black (2024)
The protagonist (
Kate Beckinsale
) is a Secret Agent.
The protagonist (
Colombiana (2011)
This starts in Colombia, 1992.
A gangster and his wife (
Cynthia Addai-Robinson
) are targeted by a hit-squad.
Their daughter turns out to be a free-runner,
and she easily evades the gun-toting adult men who chase her.
Then she outsmarts the CIA, and gets to Chicago.
Her Uncle (Cliff Curtis -
Risen
) trains her as a world-class assassin, like in
Leon
.
Fifteen years later, the girl has grown up to be Zoe Saldana . She may be the best assassin in the world, but she has a very nasty habit of grandstanding. Leaving a calling card is bad enough, but instead of killing a man with a single shot she takes out all his security team as well for no reason. This does not get her enemy's attention, she just gets herself targeted by FBI Agent Lennie James ( Walking Dead ).
The arch-villain, the Colombian drug lord who killed her parents, is under witness relocation thanks to CIA Agent Callum Blue ( Dead like Me ). However, he still has his old death squad hanging around.
This was directed by Olivier Megaton , and is basically a cliched shoot-em-up.
Concrete Blondes (2012)
The protagonist (
Samaire Armstrong
) is on a night out with her gal-pals
Diora Baird
and
Carly Pope
. They discover a suitcase containing 3 million dollars in cash.
The protagonist (
The Courier (2019)
Gary Oldman is an arch-villain, on trial for murder.
The trial relies on one key eyewitness,
and the villain's army of henchmen will do anything
to kill the witness before he can testify.
Yes, this premise seems to owe a lot to
The Hitman's Bodyguard
.
Olga Kurylenko is courier by night, vigilante by ... night. Well, she is efficient at multi-tasking. This makes her the perfect patsy for the villains. However, they did not do a proper backgrounnd check on her.
Since the heroine is a biker, this would be a great chance for the story to feature some great car chases and location shots. Unfortunately most of the budget must have gone on Oldman's salary, shot exclusively in an apartment with a couple of no-name actors. The protagonist spends most of the movie in a multi-storey carpark, being chased by a gang of mercenaries - and bumping them off one at a time. At least the script has one innovation - since the villains are appartently using smart-guns, the protagonist cannot just shoot them like in a regular Die Hard rip-off. Instead she has to get more creative, making this more reminiscent of Under Siege .
Daughter of the Wolf (2019)
This starts with a botched ransom handover that turns into a shootout.
Gina Carano
ends up in pursuit of Larson (Brendan Fehr -
Roswell High
), one of the crew who kidnapped her son.
She makes him lead her to the rest of the gang.
The kidnappers are led by Father (Richard Dreyfuss - Jaws (1975) ). Unfortunately they cannot shoot straight, and they are being stalked by a ravenous pack of man-eating wolves.
The acting is not great - Dreyfuss chews the scenery, but Carano seems quite out of her depth. The setting worked better in a few Canadian thrillers starring Marie Avgeropolous . The storyline uses aspects from a couple of Liam Neeson films - the kidnapped offspring worked better in Taken and the wolves were a more effective presence in The Grey . As for the action scenes - the stunt doubles may outnumber the listed cast, but the fights themselves are unconvincing.
Desperate Hour, The (2022)
The protagonist (
Naomi Watts
) is a widowed single mother.
She goes out for a morning jog
while her children are meant to be at school,
and conducts her life over her mobile phone.
Yes, this is a lot like Locke -
the one-man play starring Tom Hardy.
Things take a turn for the worse when the protagonist discovers there is a shooting incident at her son's school. Yes, this movie deals with the same kind of school shooting as Run Hide Fight (2021) ... but the politics of it are very different. Instead of showing guns as tools that can be used for good or evil, this movie has an anti-gun message tagged on to the end credits.
Since this was shot during the Covid lockdown, most of it is about the main character alone in the woods. Instead of confronting the villain with physical violence, she interacts with him and the other characters over her phone. Perhaps the best comparison would be with that movie which features Ryan Reynolds buried alive in a wooden crate.
The other thing that sets this movie apart is the fact that suspicion is thrown on the protagonist's son. This begs a comparison with We Need to Talk About Kevin.
Destroyer (2018)
Erin Bell (
Nicole Kidman
) is an LAPD detective, the cliched hard-drinking alcoholic divorcee.
While this would be acceptable for a male star,
in this case it just makes the female star look her own age.
She gets a murder case,
a gang member who was killed execution-style.
This is the same gang that she once went undercover to infiltrate,
fifteen years earlier.
Now she has to look up a bunch of familiar faces.
The flashbacks, of Erin in her rookie days, show the made-up Kidman that we are used to. Her police partner in the undercover job is Chris (Sebastian Stan - Captain America: Winter Soldier ). In a well-acted story, we see them get sucked further and further into the underworld life that they are only supposed to pretend.
Erin's target is Silas (Toby Kebbell - Hurricane Heist ), the former leader of the ARV gang. She will do anything to get her hands on him, which comes out when she goes after his girlfriend Petra ( Tatiana Maslany ). This leads to a tough girl-fight, although the movie does not seem to pass the Bechdel test.
The protagonist (
DOA: Dead Or Alive (2006)
A trio of high-kicking kung-fu babes (Ninja Princess
Devon Aoki
, Texan wrestler
Jamie Pressley
and Australian cat-burglar
Holly Valance
) are all invited by rollergirl
Sarah Carter
and suspiciously friendly Eric Roberts (
The Expendables
) to fight in a Mixed Martial-Arts tournament.
Like in
Mortal Kombat
, without all the Otherworld stuff.
Natassia Malthe is a Ninja sent to kill the Princess for abandoning the clan. The so-called Ninjas use Chinese skills, not Japanese ones, but this is not the kind of film to take seriously.
The fights are well-shot and expertly choreographed, but it descends to typically OTT wire-fu. This was shot by a Hong Kong director on a Hollywood budget ...
The Doorman (2020)
Ali (
Ruby Rose
) is a military combat veteran who gets hired for security in an apartment block.
Her dead sister's widower (Rupert Evans -
Charmed (2019)
) and kids live in the building,
so she gets to spend time with them on her day off.
The building is meant to be closed for renovations. Unfortunately the work crew turns out to be a heist crew led by Victor Dubois (Jean Reno - Godzilla (1998) ). Although the place is meant to be virtually empty, they bring military-grade weaponry with them. Martinez (Louis Mandylor - ) brings his safe-cracking equipment, just in case they need to crack a massive safe.
In a completely original storyline, the protagonist uses her military skills to bump off the villains, one at a time. She is pretty ruthless, making no attempt to take prisoners or even to negotiate for the hostages' safety. In contrast, the Frenchman in charge of the robbers is only trying to reclaim property that was stolen by another crook.
Ali's love interest is a history professor. If he is compared to a character in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , he would be Marcus Brody. Therefore he gets stuck babysitting the small child while the woman saves the day. In contrast, his teenage son has a skillset far closer to the protagonist's. The boy did a project on the building's secret tunnels, and knows morse code from his time as a boy scout. As a result, he has more meaningful interactions with her.
At the end of the day, this is an uneven mess. Ali's skillset improves when the plot demands it, like when she has to disarm friendlies without killing them, but the deadly combat scenes are made to look more intense. In all fairness, this is just a cheap shoot-em-up made in Romania.
The protagonist (
Dual (2022)
The protagonist (
Karen Gillan
) is a young woman who gets a medical diagnosis of a fatal illness.
She has herself cloned.
However, when the diagnosis proves false
the law dictates that the clone and the original must publicly battle to the death.
There can be only one ...
She gets combat training from a specialist (Aaron Paul - Westworld: S3 ). While she complains about not having an active sex life, she also procrastinates about providing alternate forms of payment.
Emily The Criminal (2022)
The protagonist, Emily (
Aubrey Plaza
), is a low-paid food-service worker.
She needs a lot of money to pay off her college debt.
Despite her friend (
Megalyn E.
) trying to help her find a better-paying job,
Emily is held back by her criminal record.
Since she has nothing to lose,
she takes a side-job with Youcef (Theo Rossi -
Vendetta (2022)
) in credit card fraud.
Emily gets promoted to sub-contractor. This just gets her more deeply involved in crime, since there are bigger and nastier fish. How far can she trust Youcef and his cousin?
This is like a female version of Breaking Bad. Although her College debt is not as bad as Walter White's cancer, it certainly provides a plausible reason for a regular person to become a career criminal. The potential employers, like Gina Gershon and Dr Phlox ( Enterprise ), are only out to exploit the unwary. In comparison, the criminals are relatively honest about their evil intentions.
Everly (2015)
Everly (
Salma Hayek
) is a woman who spent four years as a sex slave of the Yakuza.
Now, on the day she had planned to make her escape,
her old boss sends his goons to attack her apartment.
He even sends the other hookers, including
Jennifer Blanc
. However, Everly manages to take them all on single-handedly.
Like all modern crime/action thrillers, this owes a lot to the works of Quentin Tarantino . It is basically Kill Bill made on the budget of Reservoir Dogs.
Excessive Force 2: Force on Force (1995)
This starts with a gangland assassination team
get ambushed by a team of mercenaries.
A homeless man sees one of the shooters,
and the cops trace the shooter's tattoo to the US Navy Seals.
When they report this to the US Military,
a Special Forces operator named Bobbi (
Stacey Randall
) investigates.
Bobbi is not a great investigator, since she tends to kill suspects rather than take them alive for interrogation. It turns out that she is not an NCIS agent, and instead just wants revenge on her former Special Forces unit.
The result is a halfway decent movie. Considering it is a low-budget straight-to-video effort from the mid-nineties it is actually quite watchable. While there are no recognisable names in the cast, they acquit themselves well. The bad guys are actually fleshed out, rather than just being cardboard targets for the protagonist to knock down. Also, despite Bobbi and the others being proficient with martial arts the characters only go hand-to-hand as a last resort. Instead they do what real Navy Seals would do, and that is to go for a weapon at every opportunity.
Fathom (
Fresh Kills (2023)
The protagonist (
Jennifer Esposito
) is a ...
The protagonist (
Ghost in the Shell (2017)
This is a completely unnecessary remake of a classic Manga cartoon.
The story originates in Japan,
but it is made in an era when the big Hollywood studios are attempting to open up the Chinese market.
So who is the best person to play the lead role?
The role is for an Asian female, but will the actress be Japanese or Chinese?
Well ... it is the auburn-haired caucasian
Scarlett Johannson
! Her sidekick is another caucasian - Pilou Asbaek (
Game of Thrones
). The only non-English speaker is the boss (Beat Takeshi -
), who talks in Japanese while everyone else responds to him in English.
The film is intended to be shown to American audiences without subtitles. As a result it completely lacks subtlety. For example, when Johansson becomes a cyborg the doctor ( Juliette Binoche ) explains that her mind - the Ghost of the title - is in a shell-like robot body.
The Major, a cyborg, is part of a police unit that runs a dystopian city. The villains are held to be bad people because they believe that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. In contrast, the police kill suspects on sight and rarely take prisoners, so the issue of morality is irrelevant.
Ghosted (2023)
The protagonist (Chris Evans -
Captain America
) is a regular guy who meets a beautiful woman (
Ana Armas
). He tries to give her a romantic surprise,
but discovers that she is a ...
Let's just say that she has a lot in common with her character in the James Bond movie No Time To Die . Or possibly the John Wick spin-off Ballerina .
Gloria (1980)
Gloria (
Gena Rowlands
) is a middle-aged gangster's moll.
Her neighbour, a mob accountant,
has double-crossed their employers.
As a result, he and his entire family are targeted
for termination with extreme prejudice.
The six-year-old boy, Phil, ends up in Gloria's care.
All brutal stuff, reminiscent of the 1970s gangster films of
Martin Scorsese
.
As the mismatched pair go on the run together, dodging gangsters like Tom Noonan ( Robocop 2 ), their bond begins to grow. Gloria never had kids of her own, and her maternal skills are non-existent. However, she learns to make do.
John Cassavettes delivers a movie that combines tension with pathos. Well, his previous writer/director piece was The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie, a similar story about a low-level criminal who turns out to be a bad-ass. The cast includes a bartender played by Lawrence Tierney ( Star Trek: TNG ).
Gloria (
A Good Woman Is Hard To Find (2019)
A single mother (
Sarah Bolger
) living in a dodgy working-class neighbourhood
is dragged into a drug-dealer's plot.
The violence escalates,
until she eventually goes on a murder spree.
The problem is that this film lacks any kind of context. It is set in a working class neighbourhood in Belfast, which is an incredibly politicised environment. The truth is that this was written by a Dublin-based screenwriter, so it is basically a Dublin story that is only set in Belfast.
Guardian (2014)
The protagonist (
Sarah Carter
) is a martial arts expert.
Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)
Sam (
Karen Gillan
) is a hit-woman who works for The Firm.
Her mother (
Lena Headey
) trained her as as assassin,
then left town and abandoned her in the care of her boss Nathan (Paul Giamatti -
Morgan
). While The Firm may be run by men,
it turns out that the Assassins' Guild is run by women.
Sam gets help from her mother's friends - Madeline the Librarian (
Carla Gugino
), Anna May (
Angela Bassett
) and Florence (
Michelle Yeoh
). The doctor, ironcally a traditionally female profession, is a man (Michael Smiley -
A Field In England
).
Sam messes up two assignments in one night. She kills the son of a rival gangster, Jim McAlester (Ralph Ineson - Hurricane Heist ). Then, she decides to make a ransom drop instead of a simple debt collection. While her intentions are pure, and she saves a young girl's life in the process, she can no longer count on the protection of her former bosses. Now she must go on the run with the girl, pursued by McAlester's nephew (Adam Nagaitis - The Terror ) and a couple of dozen expendable hitmen.
The violence is so extreme that it might be called Tarantinoesque. However, Quentin Tarantino started with Reservoir Dogs - which used extreme violence in a way that shocked the audience. In contrast, the violence in this film is generally without consequences - it is comedic violence that is pretty much played for laughs. While it may seem to be a female version of John Wick , it owes more to the most recent version of Charlie's Angels (2019) .
Rambo: Last Blood was called out because the protagonist basically wipes out the adult male population of a Mexican slum. In comparison, this movie kills all the Russian and Irish-American men ... yet it is portrayed as being good clean fun.
Hanna (2011)
Hanna (
Saoirse Ronan
) is raised in a snowy wilderness to be an expert warrior - like
Conan the Barbarian
. Being a girl, however, a better comparison might be
to say that she was raised like Hit-Girl in
Kick-Ass
.
Eric Bana has been living in secret off the grid, like he did in Hulk . But when Hanna is old enough, he sends her to kill his arch-enemy Cate Blanchett .
This has elements of fairytales, with Hanna as a Little Red Riding Hood and Blanchett as a Wicked Witch. But Bana is an unstoppable killing machine in his own right, especially compared to the mediocre henchmen that Blanchett deploys, that the main battle is something of an anti-climax.
Haywire (2011)
This is a modern 21st Century thriller,
but it is closer in tone to the 1970s than the techno-thrillers of today. Mallory (
Gina Carano
) is a female Jason Bourne, on a roaring rampage of revenge, rather than a hi-tech James Bond.
She is double-crossed and left for dead, as is typical in these things.
Can the lead actress cut it? She is a Mixed Martial Arts cage-fighter, not a supermodel or Shakespearean thespian, but the script was written for her strengths. If The Rock can follow in Arnold Schwarzenegger's footsteps, why can a woman not do likewise? A look at the male action stars (Van Damme, Seagal, Lundgren, etc) shows a tendency towards athleticism over thespianism.
Stephen Soderburgh delivers a lot of action, but the cast does not let up in terms of acting ability. Duplicitous characters include Michael Fassbender ( X-Men: First Class ), Ewan McGregor ( Star Wars: TPM ) and Antonio Banderas ( Mark of Zorro ).
Rachel Stone (
Heist (2015)
Jeffrey Dean Morgan (
Watchmen
) needs a lot of money because his daughter has cancer.
Yes, just like in Breaking Bad we see good people
driven to crime by the lack of single-payer healthcare.
When his boss, casino owner Robert DeNiro (
Red Lights
) refuses to loan him the money,
our hero teams up with security guard Dave Batista (
Spectre
) to rob the place.
Naturally, like all movie robberies it goes wrong. The protagonists end up on a city-bus, followed by a police officer ( Gina Carano ) on night patrol. If this was shot from her perspective, it would be a straight-up action movie instead of a crime thriller.
All in all this is not a bad film, although it seems quite reminiscent of the movies of the 1990s which came out in the years after Reservoir Dogs.
High Heat (2022)
The protagonist, Ana (
Olga Kurylenko
), is a former KGB operative turned chef.
She and her husband (Don Johnson -
Watchmen
) open a restuarant together,
but on the opening night some gangsters come a-calling.
It seems that hubby has incurred serious debt at the local loan shark,
and the gangsters want to burn the place down for the insurance.
The problem with this film is that the gangsters are so comically inept that they seem to have wandered out of a parody of a Quentin Tarantino film. When the unkillable protagonist starts wiping them out, the audience empathise with her victims. Worse, despite her pride in her profession of chef she stacks the bodies of her kills in the meat locker where she also keeps the food for her customers.
There are a couple of antagonists who actually pose a legitimate threat. Predictably, both turn out to be female. One is the commander of a mercenary unit that the loan shark hires when all his male minions have been massacred. The other is Mimi ( Kaitlin Doubleday ), Ana's former cow-orker and frenemy. Does this mean that Ana defected and worked as a CIA field agent, or are Mimi and her husband deep cover for the KGB? And wasn't the KGB replaced by the FSB thirty years ago?
Hijacked (2017) AKA Altitude
The protagonist, Gretchen Blair (
Denise Richards
), is an FBI siege negotiator.
When taking a flight home,
she does a pretty poor job of profiling the other people.
Sadie the stewardess (
Greer Grammar
) is wearing an obvious wig, while Matthew Sharpe (Dolph Lungren -
Universal Soldier
) is clearly up to no good.
Gretchen finds herself seated beside Rick (Jonathan Lipnicki - ), a rich asshole who offers her fifty million to keep him safe. It turns out that he stole his money from his criminal confederates, and they plan to hijack the entire plane just to get at him.
Wesley Snipes ( Blade ) did this so much better a few decades ago in Passenger 57 , with Elizabeth Hurley as the murderous stewardess. This is a bad rip-off of a mediocre movie.
Hunt, The (2020)
Yoga Pants (
Emma Roberts
), Staten Island (Ike Barinholtz -
Suicide Squad (2015)
), Gary (Ethan Suplee -
Mallrats (1995)
) and Crystal (
Betty Gilpin
) are a bunch of Trump-supporting deplorables
who wake up in chains.
It turns out that they have been abducted by Manorgate,
a crew of rich liberals led by the mysterious Athena (
Hilary Swank
), who use the Trumpets as prey in
The Most Dangerous Game
.
What the Manorgate team failed to realise is that Crystal is a highly-trained military veteran. She handles herself like a seasoned professional, and takes on everyone who she comes up against. Unfortunately she learns she cannot trust the obvious.
This was quite controversial when it first came out, because it portrays the deplorables as sympathetic ... something which they themselves found offensive! In contrast, real-life liberals were able to laugh at a highly exaggerated portrayal of their own sensibilities.
Hurricane Heist (2018)
An American town is about to be flooded out by a major storm.
Some robbers want to steal cash from the delivery van,
and the only one who can save the federally insured money is a security guard.
There is also a redneck sheriff giving people a hard time.
Yes, the plot is Hard Rain (1998) and
Maggie Grace
is basically just the female Christian Slater.
The action heroine is helped by a pair of redneck brothers - Toby Kebbell ( Bloodshot (2020) ) and Ryan Kwanten ( True Blood ). Despite their heavy Alabama accents, one is English and the other is Australian. Well, the film was mostly shot in Bulgaria so we are lucky they spoke the right language.
The so-called villains seize the highly secure Federal depository with zero loss of life. All they want to do is steal some money that has been marked for destruction. In real life, the serial numbers would be recorded so it would be very difficult to use. Anyway, once the so-called heroine gets involved the body-count sky-rockets.
The kill scenes are done in the spirit of the Hayes Code - people can get killed, but very rarely do we see them bleed. This kind of cartoonish approach to violence, where the true consequences are not shown on-screen, is typical of modern action movies.
If Looks Could Kill (2016)
The protagonist, Faith Grey (
Stefanie Estes
) is a rookie police officer.
She and her boss are drinking in a bar
when they overhear a woman verbally abusing a man
and both automatically take the woman's side.
The man is a professional photographer,
and the woman is a model who is also his ex-girlfriend.
Now the model, Jessica Munroe (
Summer Spiro
), decides to trade up and get her claws into the male detective.
Jessica is a classic femme fatale, seducing a younger man to kill her husband so she can get the inheritance. However, even in the modern era there is little that Faith can do.
One thing that is a bit jarring is Jessica's insistence that she is a movie-star in the making. Not because she is a thirty-something, but because by the year 2016 that was already a bit old-fashioned. Social media had already begun to eclipse Reality TV, which itself was a replacement for the Soap Operas of the twentieth century. Jessica's comeuppance is reminscent of Sunset Boulevard, which is from the era that this movie aims to emulate.
In Her Line of Fire (2006) AKA Air Force Two
The protagonist (
Mariel Hemmingway
) is a US Secret Service Agent.
This movie's titles are based on a couple of 1990s movies about attacks on the US President. The alternate version, Air Force Two, has the lesbian scenes edited out for distribution in homophobic areas.
The protagonist (
In The Blood (2014)
The protagonist (
Gina Carano
) is a top MMA fighter.
While on honeymoon, her husband is abducted.
Jolt (2021)
Jolt (
Kate Beckinsale
) is a woman with superhuman strength and a tendency to extreme rage.
Basically,
She-Hulk
.
The protagonist (
Killbird (2019)
The protagonist (
Elysia Rotaru
) is a photographer.
Her car breaks down, so she visits a nearby
Cabin in the Woods
and asks the resident (Stephen Lobo -
Continuum
) for help. Unfortunately he is a paranoid conspiracy freak,
and thinks that the US military-industrial complex is after him
to cover up for 9/11 or something.
A couple of Battlestar Galactica (2003) veterans pop up. Are they innocent bystanders or CIA assassins?
The protagonist (
Kitchen, The (2018)
This is set in Hell's Kitchen,
a working-class Irish-American community in New York.
In the late 1970s a trio of gangsters are arrested by FBI Agent Common (
Run All Night
). Their wives step up to take over their crime rackets.
Yes, this is like a poor copy of
Widows (2018)
.
Each of the wives has their own story arc. The mother ( Melissa McCarthy ) has to cope without the father of her children. The battered wife ( Elizabeth Moss ) becomes lover and apprentice to a hitman (Domnall Gleason - Star Wars: The Force Awakens ). The most interesting story arc is of the black wife.
This follows in the line of movies like Scarface (1981). However, that entire genre is about the rise and fall of the gangsters. Where this movie fails is that most of the female thugs do not face any real karmic justice for their misdeeds.
The protagonist (
The protagonist (
Long Kiss Goodnight, The (1995)
Charley (
Geena Davis
) is a woman with amnesia,
who lives the life of a happy home-maker in small-town suburban USA.
Then she discovers she has a secret past, like Quaid in
Total Recall
.
The second part of the movie shares a lot with Lethal Weapon. Charley and her only ally, a Private Investigator named Mitch (Samuel L Jackson - Django Unchained ) must hunt down the villain (Craig Bierko - Red Dwarf USA ) who gave her amnesia in the first place.
The twist is simple. The CIA is facing a major budget reduction, so the boss (Patrick Malahide - Game of Thrones ) plans to stage a mass-casualty event on US soil and pin it on Arab terrorists so he can hot up a war in the Middle East and justify his budget for the forseeable future. If this sounds familiar, when the 9/11 attacks happened on the World Trade Centre five years after this movie was released, the CIA budget-building agenda was at the top of everyone's mind.
So why did Davis, best known for comedies like Earth Girls Are Easy , do an action movie? Well, ever since she talked her way into a title role in Thelma and Louise (1991) she developed an agenda to promote non-traditional roles for females. She and her husband, director Renny Harlin , furthered that agenda with a couple of female-led action movies in the mid-1990s, The other one was Cutthroat Island , which flopped so badly it sank the studio that launched it.
The protagonist (
Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
The protagonist, Jackie (
Katy O'Brian
), is an aspiring bodybuilder.
She gets involved with Lou (
Kristen Stewart
), a gymn manager in Las Vegas.
Lou's estranged family - Daisy ( Anna Baryshnikov ), Beth ( Jenna Malone ), JJ (Dave Franco - The Disaster Artist ) and Lou Snr (Ed Harris - The Abyss ) - are a crooked bunch. Jackie gets dragged into the crime and violence.
Director Rose Glass delivers a neo-noir thriller with lesbian protagonists. This is apparently a completely revolutionary idea. It is not as if the Wachowski Siblings did this three decades ago in Bound (1996) .
Lucy (2014)
Scarlet Johannson
is shanghaied (no pun intended) into delivering a mysterious briefcase to a gangster in Taiwan.
Unfortunately, these gangsters have no concept of the word subtlety.
They leave a lot of messy corpses all over the place,
like a cannibalistic family of hillbillies in a clichéd horror movie.
The McGuffin is a new drug that unlocks the human brain’s full potential. This was previously covered in the film Limitless , where the drug only increased intelligence. However, in this film the drug also gives the taker telepathy, then telekinesis … and finally turns them into a Star Trek creature of pure energy.
Mercenaries (2014)
A warlord (
Bridget Nielsen
) kidnaps the daughter of the US President.
CIA Agent
Cynthia Rothrock
decides to send in an all-female team.
Since the regular military and CIA operators are all deployed elsewhere,
the only option is to use former military personnel who were convicted of serious crimes.
Yes, this is a female version of The Dirty Dozen as much as it is of
The Expendables
.
Cassandra Clay ( Zoe Bell ) is the leader of the gang, while Vivica A. Fox is something of a wild card. Nicole Bilderbeck stands out as the best actress of the bunch, while Kristanna Lokken is as much a presence as she was in Terminator 3 .
The story is pretty simple, and as a product to The Asylum this was clearly shot on a low budget. It does not offer anything new in terms of plot or action. Indeed, everything seems to have been done before and done better. However, it is still worth watching if you are a fan of the female stars.
Miss Bala (2019)
A Latina make-up artiste (
Gina Rodriguez
) gets sick of working with Thomas Dekker (
Sarah Connor Chronicles
) in Los Angeles. She goes south to visit her friend in Baja California,
which is over the border in Mexico.
However, her trip takes a turn for the worse
when she gets caught in a shootout between cops and gangsters.
This is not a straight-up action thriller, more of a film noir. There is a crime, and the protagonist is implicated. She is blackmailed by both the gangsters and the DEA, so there is nobody she can turn to for help. Certainly not the local cops, who seem to be highly corrupt.
One of the gangsters, the local Cartel boss, uses her to smuggle things to Anthony Mackie ( Captain America: Winter Soldier ) in the USA. The heroine learns to cover her tracks, by lying and framing people for her misdeeds.
The climax is a shoot-out where she has to rescue her friend. Luckily, the Cartel boss taught her how to use an AR-15 rifle. Despite his attempts to bond with her, she is unhappy about the idea he may have lied to her. Yes, as if her part in their relationship involved complete honesty.
The protagonist (
Momentum (2015)
Olga Kurylenko
is leader of a gang of professional thieves.
Not burglary specialists, but armed robbery with violence.
They do a big heist in Cape Town, South Africa,
then plan to move on to other jobs.
A US Senator (Morgan Freeman - Angel Has Fallen ) has sent his fixer (James Purefoy - Solomon Kane ) to retrieve a stolen mcguffin. It is in the hands of one of Olga's crew, so she gets caught up in a series of chase scenes.
The female lead is a decent enough actress for the role. After all, it is an action movie - not Shakespeare. She even looks pretty good in the fight scenes, thanks to great editing and a skilled stunt double. However, she is basically a slender-built model. It just strains suspension of disbelief when she defeats heavier-built males in contests of brute strength.
The ending is open, as if to leave room for a sequel. Unfortunately it does not seem to have done well enough at the box office for the producers to justify it. Although shooting in Eastern Europe would be just as affordable as in South Africa, this is not the kind of movie that becomes a franchise-starter.
Monster Hunter (2021)
Ron Perlman (
Season Of The Witch
) captains a sailing ship that somehow sails on a sea of sand.
As if this were not a bad enough idea by itself,
the ship sails into a storm and is attacked by a Sandworm from
Dune
. The Hunter (Tony Jaa -
Fast and Furious 7
) falls out, and has to be abandoned.
Captain Artemis ( Milla Jovovich ) is a battle-hardened US Army Ranger, leader of a mixed-gender Special Ops unit that includes Megan Good . They are searching for another team that went missing. First they find a strange storm that lands them in an unfamiliar desert ... and then they find out what happened to the other team. The sandworm is not the only monster out there ...
Artemis ends up in the hands of the Hunter. Rather than try to communicate with her, he just ties her up. This begins an adversarial relationship reminiscent of Hell in the Pacific, best known by its scifi remake Enemy Mine . These mis-matched warriors must team up to fight the monsters if they ever want to find their way home.
This is a very simple story, basically a series of action scenes strung together with the backstory taken from a video game franchise. Yes, it sounds just like the Resident Evil series, which Jovovich also made with director Paul WS Anderson . But what this lacks in originality it makes up for in the quality of the SPFX.
Morgan (2016)
Brian Cox sends a young female troubleshooter (
Kate Mara
) to investigate a robotic prototype that injured one of its creators.
The robot, a girl they named Morgan (
Anya Taylor-Joy
), lives in a bunker in the grounds of a remote mansion.
The mansion this was filmed at is in Northern Ireland,
but it seems to be standing in for Canada.
The scientists include a few familiar faces -
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Yeoh, Rose Leslie
.
The film starts slowly, as we get to know a bit about each of the characters. This does not really make us care about any of them, because everything is so slow-moving that they just seem a bit boring. There is a certain amount of tension, however. That is because of the ever-present fear that this story might just be another Frankenstein story, the kind that every robot-based storyline usually turns into - one where the scientists are destroyed by their own creation.
Things really start to happen with the arrival of the interrogator (Paul Giamatti - Shoot 'Em Up ). His scene-stealing, scenery-chewing performance really brings the show to life, and lets us realise exactly what is missing from the rest of the film. Unfortunately this is something of a high point. There are a few action scenes, including the compulsory car chase, but nothing in the original setup really led up to this.
The protagonist (
My Mom Robs Banks (2016)
Someone is robbing banks in a small city in the USA.
The protagonist, a teenage schoolgirl,
begins to suspect the one responsible is her mother (
Charisma Carpenter
), a single parent and mediocre homemaker.
It turns out that the girl's brother is a degenerate gambler, and momma has made a deal with the loan shark.
The protagonist (
Never Let Go (2015)
The protagonist (
Angela Dixon
) is a single mother on vacation in North Africa with her baby.
The child is snatched by human traffickers or whatever.
Luckily, Momma has a particular set of skills.
She manages to plant a tracking beacon on the villain's getaway car,
and goes after them.
Unfortunately nobody believes her,
and the local police assume that she is up to no good.
This is not much of an action movie. The lead actress has not done other action films, she is not a martial artist or even just eye-candy for teenage boys. Instead she seems to have been cast for a female audience, as if this was intended as a human-interest drama about a single mother in a bad situation. The action scenes are hard to follow, with close-in shots and poor editing. Maybe it should have been made as a drama instead of a thriller.
The Next Karate Kid (1994)
Julie (
Hilary Swank
) is a schoolgirl grieving for the death of her parents.
Mr Miyagi is a friend of her grandmother,
and he steps in to become her mentor while grandma is out of town.
As well as teaching her some karate,
he also takes her to stay with his friends at a Buddist monastery.
Despite her animal-loving instincts,
she has trouble adapting to the zen monks ways.
The High School is virtually run by Colonel Dougan (Michael Ironside - Total Recall ), whose personal militia is called the Alpha Elite. He trains them, including Charlie (Walton Goggins - Django Unchained ), in unarmed combat. This is meant to be the equivalent of Cobra Kai in the first film. However, this storyline is really a subplot. It plays second fiddle to the romance storyline, between Julie and her love interest Eric.
This is a bit disappointing, especially considering the quality of the performers. Morita and Swank both won Academy Awards, while Ironside and Goggins are top-notch rent-a-villains. But this seems to be aimed towards a female audience, with its focus on feelings rather than action, and as such it does not work well within the established Karate Kid franchise.
The protagonist (
Nikita (1990)
The protagonist, Nikita (
Anne Parillaud
), is a junkie.
She gets conscripted by French Intelligence,
who train her as an assassin.
Ninja 3: The Domination (1984)
A ninja assassin ambushes his target on a golf course,
reminiscent of John Saxon's intro scene in
Enter the Dragon
. Then he crushes a golf ball for effect, like Oddjob does in
Goldfinger
. Finally he wipes out all the witnesses, including a dozen bodyguards.
The Ninja did not do a very good job of planning his escape route. The LAPD chase him with a patrol car and a couple of motorbikes. Then they send up a helicopter, although it flies too close to the trees for it to be effective. The cops only send patrol officers, so nobody in SWAT armour turns up, but they have the weight of numbers.
Luckily the cops are incapable of keeping the Ninja down even after he has been riddled with bullets. They cannot even follow the footprints and blood trail. A young woman ( Lucina Dickey ) encounters the dying Ninja, who gives her his sword. Although she is interviewed by a police detective, she conceals the sword.
The female protagonist is a telephone engineer by day and an aerobics instructor in the evening. Basically a toned-down version of Flashdance. She gets into a confrontation with that staple of the 1980s - a mixed-race rape gang. This one is led by a big black man who looks like a young Neil Degrasse Tyson ( Stargate Atlantis ).
A young police patrolman has taken an unprofessional interest in the woman. He joins her mostly female aerobics class, and is so physically unfit that he is the only person there who cannot stand the pace. Then he sits out the rape-gang fight, which could be out of curiosity or exhaustion but is probably due to incompetence. And rather than arrest the thugs, he drives the woman home in order to date her.
The woman discovers that the dead Ninja's sword glows, like a lightsaber. It seems the Ninjas are now Jedi Knights, because their souls can use the Force after they are dead. The Ninja's undead soul seeks revenge on the cops who killed him. This is an unusual film insofar as the protagonist and antagonist are actually the same person.
The protagonist's doctor diagnoses her with extra-sensory perception (ESP). The boyfriend realises something is going wrong. He seeks help from the local expert in Japanese supernatural affairs – James Hong from Big Trouble In Little China .
An official Police Department funeral is held for one of the victims. This might actually be for the boyfriend's partner, but the boyfriend does not actually bother to attend. Well, not officially anyway. He should have turned up in uniform to pay his respects, since the funeral was formal and had a rifle salute. Or he could have worn a black suit and tie. Instead he turns up in jeans and a tee shirt, and only then because he suspected that his girlfriend was possessed by a dead Ninja's spirit and would gatecrash it herself with murderous intent. Why risk having to explain his presence when he had a ready-made excuse to be there?
A creepy one-eyed Japanese man (Sho Koshugi - ) is hanging around the crime scenes. He is a renegade Ninja, and he is the only one who can end the curse. This means that he gets to do the climactic conclusion rather than the female lead who carried the rest of the film!
Old Guard, The (2020)
The main character (
Charlize Theron
) is the leader of a gang of centuries-old mercenaries.
Operative, The (2019)
The protagonist (
Diane Kruger
) is a Mossad operative sent undercover in Tehran.
Her story is told mostly in flashback,
as her handler (Martin Freeman -
The Hobbit
) is interviewed by his boss a few years later.
The nearest thing to compare this to is The Little Drummer Girl , although that focuses on Israel's war of terrorism and counter-terrorism in Europe, while this is more about the threat of nuclear war with Iran. The female protagonist is shown how ruthless the Mossad are, but still allows herself to be dragged into their plot. Eventually she realises that she is out of her depth, but there is nothing she can do about it.
The final act shows her in the modern day, when she tries to get herself out of the web she has been spun into. This makes her like a female Jason Bourne , hunted by the assassins she once worked alongside. If only there were a sequel that could explore this storyline further ...
Paradise Highway (2022)
Sally (
Juliette Binoche
) is a truck driver who smuggles illicit items
along her routes across the USA.
Her brother (Frank Grillo -
Captain America: Winter Soldier
) is in prison, and she has to help the gangsters on the outside
to keep him safe on the inside.
One day the rules gets changed, and Sally is forced to move a new cargo - a young girl. Things get even worse when the girl kills one of the gangsters, so Sally takes her on the run together across the country. This is all a bit reminiscent of Thelma and Louise , but the filmmakers put a new and modern spin on it.
On their trail is a grizzled detective (Morgan Freeman - Bruce Almighty ). Luckily he has a young rookie (Cameron Monaghan - Gotham ), so he can provide the audience with exposition and moralizing about the made-up issue of human trafficking.
Writer-director Anna Gutto does not deliver a straight-up Feminist man-bashing effort. Several of the antagonists are female, which is a refreshing change to see. The real bugbear of this film is not men in general, but the current right-wing fear - sex trafficking, as shown in the more clearly fictionalised effort Taken . Of course, like Promising Young Woman there is also an element of criticism of the pro-sex society that the English-speaking world developed in the 1960s.
Peppermint (2018)
This starts with a male-female fight to the death.
He pulls a knife, she pulls a gun,
and it is obvious who is going to win.
However, the realism seems to stop there.
Garner gets a deep slash across her thigh,
yet somehow walks miles on that leg
without bleeding to death from the untreated wound.
Riley North ( Jennifer Garner ) is the female version of The Punisher . Garner has done action roles before, as lead in the TV thriller series Alias (2001) and as the title character in the superhero movie Elektra (2005) . Now she comes back with a darker, more mature entry in the genre. While those previous roles had a spark of glamour and femninity, in this movie she is basically a default male. If the role was played by Gerard Butler it would be Law Abiding Citizen (2009) , although that had a much more fitting ending.
The title is not the main character's name, which is unusual for a female-led action film. In an extended flashback, we are shown that the character's daughter sold and ate peppermint cookies. Unfortunately the baby-daddy was associated with the Irish Mob, and fell foul of the Mexican Mafia. This led to him getting killed in a drive-by, along with his daughter (who he used as a human shield).
Some revenge movies, like John Wick , are about someone who has a code of honour. Some, like Death Wish, are about someone who punishes themselves by seeking confrontation. This movie is about a spree killer who wants to wipe out the Mexican Mafia. There is one character moment, however, when she beats up an unarmed white man simply because he is a high-functioning alcoholic. This may be a proxy attack on Garner's former husband (Ben Affleck - Daredevil ), who was driven to drink by the stress of being married to her.
The movie seems to glamourise vigilante justice, especially when used by white suburbanites against ethnic minorities and poor people in general. The protagonist, Riley North, is not merely the Wicked Witch of the North ... she is Kylie Titsandcooch, a female version of Kyle Rittenhouse.
Pimp (2018)
This is the story of a female pimp (
Keke Palmer
). As with most gangster stories,
it is not so much a case of rags-to-riches
as it is a rise-and-fall.
When our heroine tries to recruit a hot new girl ( Vanessa Morgan ), she falls foul of a dangerous rival pimp.
Pixie (2020)
Pixie (
Olivia Cooke
) is a tweenage femme fatale who manipulates a couple of idiots
who rip off a gang of gun-toting Catholic priests led by Alec Baldwin (
Beetlejuice
). It all gets a bit complicated,
and she ends up on the run with a couple of losers and a bag full of drugs.
Pixie's stepfather (Colm Meaney -
Star Trek: DS9
), the top gangster in town, sends his best hitman (Ned Dennehy -
Roadkill
) after the fugitives.
This is set in County Sligo in the West of Ireland, but none of the main cast seem to be from that town. In fact, it is a Northern Ireland Screen co-production so the indoor scenes were probably all shot in Belfast.
Point of no Return (1993)
The protagonist (
Bridget Fonda
) is a junkie.
She gets conscripted by American Intelligence,
who train her as an assassin.
The Proposal (2001)
The protagonist (
Jennifer Esposito
) is a ...
The protagonist (
Proud Mary (2018)
Like most female-led action movies,
this is named after the protagonist.
The fact that Mary (
Taraji P. Henson
) is specified as being Proud is a reference to a
Tina Turner
song, thus marking this as a modern-day Blaxploitation movie.
Henson previously played a freelance killer in Smoking Aces . This time she is an assassin who works for a Chicago crime syndicate run by Danny Glover ( Age of Dragons ). One of the killings she commits leaves a young boy orphaned. A year later, the boy is homeless and earns a crust by running errands for a rival gangster, Uncle (Xander Berkley - Barb Wire ). A shocking indictment of Child Protective Services and the foster-care system. Mary intervenes, and things get violent.
It looks like things might boil over into all-out war with Uncle's gang. Mary needs a patsy, so she picks the black syndicate's token white man - her good buddy Walter (Neal McDonagh - Legends of Tomorrow ). He is implied to be of the same inclination as his character in Justified, but this is still a nasty move for a character to make.
The gang war breaks out anyway. The Godfather has a small army of thugs and enforcer, but he prefers to use Mary as a one-woman army. After all, he trained her and his son as super-assassins. This is the old cliche, like Liam Neeson in Run All Night or Tom Hanks in Road To Perdition . In other words, this is a very old-fashioned kind of movie.
In the climax, Mary's unofficial foster-son gets held hostage by her bosses. She must defeat her entire army of cow-orkers in order to save the boy. Obviously, this chevalric motive raises her above the generic hard-boiled revenge-motivated heroes of most film noir movies. However, sad to say this film really has nothing new or original to offer.
The protagonist (
Red Sparrow (2018)
This is a star vehicle for
Jennifer Lawrence
, a capable actress who was boosted to super-stardom status.
Since she made it directly after
Passengers
, a blockbuster that lost money because of a backlash
against her casting in a reactive role,
she is now cast in a far more active role.
Lawrence is a Prima Ballerina in Moscow when she gets an injury that ends her career. This is when her character is established, as is the genre of the film. She seeks bloody revenge on those she holds responsible for her injury. Throughout the film, she follows the path of revenge. There is no character development, no learning of morality - the only thing she develops is her ability to destroy peoples' bodies and lives.
The ex-Ballerina's uncle is Assistant Director of Russian Intelligence. He recruits her for undercover work, and sends her to a special school run by Charlotte Rampling . She is trained to seduce and destroy enemies of the state, like a female James Bond.
Meanwhile, a CIA Agent (Joel Edgerton - Midnight Special (2015) ) is running a Mole in Moscow. Unfortunately Edgerton's tradecraft is sloppy: his pass-off is clumsy, and draws attention of local beat cops. Worse, he then panicks and then blows his cover. Yes, he is the worst CIA Agent ever. But he has to be, to make the ex-Ballerina look good.
Finally, Lawrence is posted abroad with flat-mate Thekla Reuten , and ordered to seduce Edgerton in order to uncover the Mole. She tells him that she wants to defect, for some strange reason. Her logic is never realistically explained - however, she is obsessed with revenge for any imagined slight so perhaps it is best to see her as a manipulator akin to Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct . Only without the glamourous sex scenes, of course. At its heart this is a grim and gritty revenge thriller, nothing more.
Rhythm Section, The (2020)
This starts in Tangier, with Stephanie Patrick (
Blake Lively
) on a mission to assassinate someone.
The rest of the story is in flashback.
Stephanie is an English girl whose parents and siblings were killed in a plane crash. Since then, for the last three years, she has fallen on hard times - with addiction issues and a job as a low-end sex worker. A freelance journalist confronts her with his theory that the plane was destroyed by a terrorist's bomb. She sets out to track down and kill the terrorist cell.
Stephanie is trained by an ex-MI6 agent named Boyd (Jude Law - AI: Artificial Intelligence ). This is a great sequence, developing the characters and their relationship. It is so much better than the other female-led action movie where Law played the heroine's mentor - Captain Marvel .
Stephanie goes undercover as a freelance assassin named Petra, and gets involved with an underworld fixer named Serra (Sterling K Brown - The Predator (2019) ). For the right price, he will give her info on the terrorists ... and even find some high-paying wet-work for her to do.
This is a revenge thriller, so there is no chivalry or glamour. The violence is brutal, and Stephanie takes a real beating a few times. Of course, as the protagonist she wins more than she loses.
The main plot is about hunting down the mysterious mastermind behind the bombing - an Unknown Suspect known only as codename U17. The problem with this is that it is basically a whodunnit that has a very limited list of suspects. Not as bad as the MCU movies, which all have pretty much the same twist, but it still gets a bit predictable.
Rip It Off (2001)
The protagonist (
Jennifer Esposito
) is a ...
The protagonist (
Run Hide Fight (2021)
The protagonist (
Isabel May
) is a High School girl in small-town USA.
Her father (Thomas Jane -
Punisher
) is a deer-hunter who taught her how to use a hunting rifle,
but beyond that she has no special skills.
As a result she is a compelling character
that is relatable and sympathetic,
unlike the two-dimensional Mary Sue protagonists
in most contemporary female-led action movies.
It is Senior Prank Day at High School, when the graduating class play practical jokes on the teachers. A handful of the pupils have taken it a step further, and hold half the school hostage at gunpoint. They have diversions to distract the Sheriff (Treat Williams - The Phantom ), so the girl is left to save the day. If anything, the most unbelievable aspect about it is the fact that the school staff apparently cannot hear the gunshots!
This is the first movie by Ben Shapiro's production house, and it is nice to see that an indie movie is getting a wide release. While Shapiro is best known as a so-called Alt-Right figure, this movie focuses on entertainment rather than politics. The irony is that, with Shapiro's signing of Gina Carano , he might become the main Producer of female-led action movies.
Salt (2010)
Evelyn Salt (
Angelina Jolie
) is a CIA Agent.
She gets accused of being a mole,
so she goes on the run to clear her name.
Yes, the same plotline that Tom Cruise goes through in every
Mission: Predictable
movie. Ironically, Cruise apparently turned this movie down.
Liev Shriver (
Scream
) is in charge of the (wo-)man hunt.
When this came out, mainstream critics lauded it as the first female-led action movie. Of course, not only is this a slap in the face to fans of the Resident Evil franchise or the Underworld series, but it also ignores the fact that the female lead in this film had already starred in TWO Lara Croft movies!
Sentinelle (2021)
The protagonist (
Olga Kurylenko
) is a soldier.
Shadow in the Cloud (2020)
The protagonist (
Chloe Grace Moretz
) is a Women's Royal Air Force officer
on a mission to transport a package by airplane.
Although the crew are strangely reluctant to have a woman aboard,
they are forced to obey orders.
However, they force her to sit in the hull turret.
This is a lucky move,
because it allows the female director to employ the Female Gaze.
This means instead of showing the audience what happens,
we just hear the characters talk about it
as the protagonist listens in on the radio.
Luckily she wins the battle of the sexes,
by being better at both gunnery and piloting
than all the males.
Just like in the movie Twilight Zone , there is something on the wing. The crew do not believe the protagonist, so she has to fight it single-handedly. Luckily she has some kind of super-power which allows her to clamber around the plane's underside while it is going full speed at maximum altitude. Yes, this takes a cartoonish approach to physics which destroys all suspense and fear of consequences.
The problem with the story itself is that there is too much conflict - or rather, there are three different sources of it. The male crew are a bunch of misogynistic thugs who create conflict with the female protagonist. Worse, the plane itself is under attack by Japanese aircraft. Finally, there is the main conflict itself - the battle against the murderous gremlin.
This is a pretty terrible example of the creature feature subgenre. However, the girl-power battle-of-the-sexes stuff only makes it so much worse.
The protagonist (
Stowaway (2022)
Bella (
Ruby Rose
) is a convicted felon.
She gets a call from Ed (Frank Grillo -
Captain America: Winter Soldier
), her father's buddy from the military.
The bad news is that her father is dead.
The good news is that she has inherited a super-yacht.
Bella decides to celebrate with a one-night stand. She and her pickup, Michael (Patrick Schwartzenegger - ), wake up fully dressed in the middle of the night. The boat is underway, hijacked by a trio of gun-toting thugs. Michael goes for help, but Bella cannot swim so she is left on the boat.
The boat has an insurance value of over ten million dollars. The hijackers are after the contents of the safe, which is supposedly eighty million dollars. Bella's father, supposedly a deadbeat who abandoned her, apparently has that much in illicit assets.
This is the kind of small-scale movie, with a limited cast and isolated locations, that was prevalent during the Covid-19 lockdown. Those limitations also make it look a bit cheap,
Survivor (2015)
Kate Abbot (
Milla Jovovich
) is a security officer working at the US Embassy in London.
When she investigates a visa application by a scientist named Balan (Roger Rees -
Robin Hood: Men In Tights (1993)
), she discovers a disturbing pattern that may be linked to international terrorism.
The obvious suspect is her boss, Bill Talbot (Robert Forster -
), but rather than report him she continues to blindly trust him.
When Kate is out with Naomi Rosenbaum ( Antonia Thomas ) and her other cow-orkers, they are targeted by an aging hit-man known as the Watchmaker (Pierce Brosnan - Die Another Day (2002) ). When Kate escapes, she is blamed for the incident and labelled a terrorist. Yes, this is a generic Mission: Predictable plot about a spy who has been disavowed and must save the day by outsmarting their own Agency instead of just working within the system.
MI5 Agent Paul Anderson (James D'Arcy - Agent Carter ) is after Kate, and US Ambassador Maureen Crane ( Angela Bassett ) gives him her express permission to kill Kate on sight. The only one who seems to believe Kate is Embassy security officer Sam Parker (Dylan McDermott - ). Of course, he might be a mole as well.
In the third act, Kate starts to hunt the Watchman instead of the other way around. She has deduced that the plot involves a massive bomb in New York City, so she gets there and chases down the plotters.
Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)
This is an action movie about a former smoke-jumper
who has been reduced to alcoholism because of a failed psychiatric evaluation.
What makes this different from the usual straight-to-video action fare
is the casting of
Angelina Jolie
as the cliched alcoholic PTSD veteran.
She is well suited to action thrillers, having made several in the past,
just as she has never made a successful romantic comedy.
The problem is that she has such perfect cheekbones and eye makeup
that she is reminiscent of Billy Zane in Titanic.
Hardly the stuff of a burned-out alcoholic.
A thousand miles away, Aiden Gillen ( Game of Thrones ) and Nicholas Hoult ( X-Men: First Class ) are a couple of hitmen with a contract to fulfill. Yes, the villains hired an Englishman and an Irishman to pose as Americans for some reason. Their intended victim (Jake Weber - Medium ) stays a step ahead of them, and heads off to stay with his brother-in-law Deputy Ethan (Jon Bernthal - The Walking Dead ).
The hitmen set a trap for their victim. However, the man's young son ends up in the hands of Jolie the firefighter. This leads to a situation reminiscent of the trope in childrens' fiction that all the adults have to become neutralised or evil. Since this movie has two female action heroes, one of whom is heavily pregnant, the plot demands that the hitmen – who are incredibly competent when they face off against grown men - become incredibly incompetent against the two women.
The verdict? If you want to see a good movie about the forest service fire-fighters, check out Always - a little-known gem by Steven Spielberg . And if you are looking for a good action movie with Angelina Jolie, try Salt .
The protagonist (
Ultraviolet (2006)
Violet (
Milla Jovovich
) is a vampiric assassin in a Utopian future.
She uses her superpowers to challenge the dictatorship
in a climax strangely reminiscent of the far superior
Equilibrium
. They share the same director,
though Equilibrium's German locations made it authentic and menacing
while in contrast Ultraviolet's over-reliance on CGI makes it look cartoonish.
Unlocked (2017)
The protagonist (
Noomi Rapace
) is a CIA Agent.
Vanquish (2021)
A former hard-ass is pulled out of retirement
when their child is abducted.
The hard-ass is strapped with a body-camera,
given orders by remote control,
and sent on a one-night mission to hit five local organised crime leaders.
Yes, this is the same plot as the far superior
Seized (2020)
.
One of the main players is the boss of a gang of corrupt cops, like Denzel Washington in Training Day. He gets crippled in the line of duty, like Denzel Washington in The Bone Collector. So which actor was cast in the role? Morgan Freeman ( Shawshank Redemption )!
What sets this apart from the movie it apes is that the protagonist is Ruby Rose . Unfortunately she is pretty unconvincing, although in all fairness the script is pretty bland. This is the kind of stuff Jason Staham does, although in fairness he probably turned it down.
Whiteout (2009)
Carrie Stetko (
Kate Beckinsale
) is a US Federal Marshal posted at the base in Antarctica.
Widows (2018)
The movie starts with Liam Neeson (
Taken
) and John Bernthal (
Punisher
) conducting a heist.
Their getaway ends badly when the Police SWAT team
acts like a murder squad and shoots first rather than ask questions.
The widows, Viola Davis and Michelle Rodriguez , must team up to complete the next heist their husbands had planned.
The story has a subplot about the corruption of Chicago politics. The African-American candidate is a gangster who sends his henchman (Daniel Kaluga - Get Out! ) out to retrieve his stolen money by any means necessary. The rival candidate (Colin Farrell - Minority Report ), pushed into a political career by his overbearing father (Robert Duvall - ), is really not much better.
Wildcat (2021)
Kat (
Georgina Campbell
) is a worker from the US Embassy in Iraq.
She and a US Marine from her protection team have survived an ambush,
which happened off-screen before the story starts,
and they wake up as prisoners locked in a Jihadi's basement.
Kat holds out under basic torture, while her Marine bodyguard takes far worse abuse. When confronted with the threat of sexual assault she cracks like a nut, although she chides the Marine when he also cracks in order to save her. Surprise, surprise - this was written and directed by a man. Perhaps if one of those roles had been performed by a female then this would be a bit more convincing.
This is not a big-budget action movie - more like a theatre play adapted to the bog screen. There are two sets used, and less than a dozen actors. Since the violence mostly happens off-screen, Kat does not try to defeat her captors physically but instead tries to gather as much information about them as she can in order to use it against them.
Yes, Madam (1985)
The protagonist (
Michelle Yeoh
) is a plainclothes police officer in Hong Kong.
She normally deals with flashers,
and enforcing censorship of pornography.
By incredible coincidence,
some bank-robbers stage a heist on the same street as her operation.
She single-handedly takes the robbers out,
in a well-edited action scene
on a par with any other 1980s HK movie shoot-out.
A hitman is after a microfilm that could incriminate a major gangster. Unfortunately a pair of low-level burglars make off with the passport the microfilm is contained in. The hitman killed the courier, who was a senior police officer from England. Scotland Yard send their best detective, Carrie Norris ( Cynthia Rothrock ), to investigate. The two female detectives team up to save the day.
In a male buddy-cop film, the partners are usually reluctant to work together and show a rivalry until the final Act. However, this movie has women-supporting-women from the get-go.
This is something of a comedy-thriller, because the burglars and their accomplices play a major role in the storyline. However, there is also a more serious side. There is at least one fatality of a major character, so the violence has consequences when the story requires it.
Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
This is a true-life film about Maya (
Jessica Chastain
), a character based on a top CIA Agent.
This movie follows her as she leads the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.
Because it tries to stick to the real-life events,
she does not perform any super-human action hero antics.
Instead, the climactic shoot-out features US Navy Seals.
The third act had to be re-shot, and this scene added,
because real-life events caught up with the fictionalised version
and Bin Laden's assassination took place before the movie's release.
Kathryn Bigelow made this as the follow-up to her Oscar-winning Iraq War movie, Hurt Locker. That film has been said to be the beneficiary of the American Film Academy's antagonism to Bigelow's ex-husband, James Cameron , whose film Avatar was also up for many awards that year. In contrast, the Academy's members seem to have objected to this film's storyline and instead chose to award the Best Picture oscar to Ben Affleck's movie Argo . If they had been serious about the quality of Affleck's movie, he would have been nominated for the Best Director award. Although Argo is also a Hollywood take on a true-life story about the USA's involvement in Middle East politics, the Affleck movie showed Hollywood tricksters saving the day with non-violent means. In contrast, Bigelow's version depicted real-life CIA torture techniques.
Female-Led Westerns
Bad Girls (1995)
This is set in the year 1895,
and starts with a newspaper headline about Nelly Bly -
the female journalist who went around the world
in less than eighty days.
Bandidas (2006)
The protagonist (
Penelope Cruz
) is a farmer's daughter in Old Mexico.
Her father owes money to the local bank,
but unfortunately that bank has been bought out by an American bank.
She teams up with the local banker's daughter (
Salma Hayek
), so they can settle their grudges together.
The villains call in a specialist (Steve Zahn - Sahara ), a late Victorian-era CSI a bit like in Murdock Mysteries. Of course, since he is a good guy at heart he ends up helping the Bandidas once he realises they are the victims.
This was written and directed by Luc Besson of all people - it is more like one of his generic female-centric action-comedies than an actual western.
Cold Mountain (2003)
Inman (Jude Law -
Gattacca
) is a Confederate soldier,
part of an army defending Dixieland from the US Federal military.
Injured in battle, he gets tended to by the Doctor (James Rebhorn -
) and Mrs Morgan (
Emily Deschanel
). He thinks back to his home,
a tiny village named Cold Mountain,
a thousand miles away in North Carolina.
In flashbacks, we learn that Ada Monroe ( Nicole Kidman ) and her ailing father, Reverend Monroe (Donald Sutherland - Don't look Now ), moved to Inman's village from the big city. When the war started and she was left alone, her book-learnings did her no good as a homemaker in a remote rural town in Dixieland. Luckily Ruby Thewes ( Renee Zellweger ) turns up looking for work. Although both Ruby and Ada are unmarried, and would probably have been in their twenties in real life, the actresses were both in their mid-thirties when they filmed this.
Inman deserts and decides to walk home. On his thousand-mile trip he joins up with Reverend Veasey (Philip Seymour Hoffman - Hunger Games ), a fellow renegade. They negotiate help and shelter from the likes of the Ferry Girl ( Jena Malone ) and a farmer named Junior (Giovanni Ribisi - The Gift ), who introduces them to his wife's lonely sister Shyla ( Taryn Manning ). Later, Inman meets a war-widow named Sara ( Natalie Portman ). Unfortunately Bardolph (Cillian Murphy - Oppenheimer ) and his Federal raiders are on the loose ... in a scene that may have inspired The Keeping House .
While Inman's journey is nothing but horror, Ada toughens up quickly and becomes successful as a pioneer woman. The only problem is that Teague (Ray Winstone - Robin of Sherwood ) and his sadistic albino sidekick, Bosie (Charlie Hunnam - Pacific Rim ), lead the local Home Guard to hunt down deserters. This does not directly affect Ada until the sudden appearance of Stobrod Thewes (Brendan Gleeson - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ), Ruby's estranged father. In all fairness, he seems to have done a good job of turning her into hardy pioneer woman. He and his sidekick Pangle (Ethan Suplee - Mallrats ) drop by, inadvertently making the farm a target for Teague.
Writer-director Anthony Minghella delivers an impressive follow-up to The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley . He employed an all-star cast, and chose to use film cameras rather than digital in order to get the best look of the spectacular landscapes. It was filmed on location in Eastern Europe, which explains the naturalistic landscapes and the large number of British Isles cast members. If the film has one weak spot, it is that since he and the original novelist (Charles Frazier) are men, the result is a film that features many important female characters and yet lacks any female credit among the writers or directors.
Hannah's Law (2012)
This is a Canadian made-for-TV western directed by
Rachel Talalay
.
Abeline, Texas in 1866. A young girl lives on a farm with her father (Cameron Bancroft - Codename Eternity ) and the rest of her family. Unfortunately the family are massacred by a gang led by a outlaw named McMurphy (John Pyper-Ferguson - Alphas ). McMurphy wears a Union Army cap, although since his gang includes a Native American he may just be a deserter.
Ten years later the girl has grown up to become Sarah Canning . She earns a living as a bounty hunter, serving warrants made out by Wyatt Earp (Greyston Holt - Bitten ). There is a gambler in the local tavern who seems to be Doc Holliday, Which one is her love interest?
Familiar faces include a powerful cattle baron (Billy Zane - Back to the Future ).
There is a predictable subplot. The protagonist's foster father Isaac (Danny Glover - Age of Dragons ) is wanted for murder. Another bounty hunter comes to town in search of him.
The protagonist (
Jane Got A Gun (2015)
Jane (
Natalie Portman
) discovers that her husband, Bill (Noah Emmerich -
), has been shot full of holes by a gang of outlaws.
Worse, they are on their way to finish the job.
Luckily, Jane is a hardy pioneer woman.
This could almost be a sequel to her cameo in
Cold Mountain
, except Jane's fiance fought for the North instead of the South.
Jane hires the neighbour to help her defend the farm. He is her ex-fiance, so there is a lot of interpersonal stuff going on.
We get a series of flashbacks to Jane's romance before the Civil War. Then, when her fiance goes off to be a hero, she decides to take her daughter and become pioneers in New Mexico. Yes, this is Manifest Destiny in action - the Mexicans and Native Americans have been driven off, so the land is free for the white folk.
The leaders of the gang are Bill Bishop (Ewan McGregor - Star Wars: Phantom Menace ) and his brother Vic (Boyd Holbrook - Morgan (2016) ). However, this is not much of a reunion for the two stars of Star Wars: 1-3 . Instead, it seems to be just another female-led action piece that McGregor has charitably lent his A-list name to. After all, it comes between Haywire (2011) and Birds of Prey (2020) .
So why is this not a much more well-known film? Perhaps its troubled production has something to do with it. The original Director ( Lynne Ramsey ) quit, and the main cast had to be re-shuffled. This kind of thing must have hit the studio's confidence, and resulted in a lack of promotion for the film.
The protagonist (
Missing, The (2003)
The protagonist (
Cate Blanchett
) is a medicine woman in Arizona in the final days of the Wild West.
One day she sends her eldest daughter (
Evan Rachel Wood
) off with the ranch manager (Aaron Eckhart -
The Dark Knight
). When they are ambushed by bloodthirsty natives,
the lady doctor and her younger daughter mount up
and give chase for a rescue mission.
Along for the ride is her father (Tommy Lee Jones - Space Cowboys ), an aging renegade who abandoned her and her mother so he could enjoy the freedom of the open road. The skills he picked up along the way, as well as friends like Eric Sweig ( Last of the Mohicans ), turn out to be useful.
The Sheriff (Clint Howard - True Grit ) passes responsibility to the US Army. Unfortunately the Army, led by Val Kilmer ( Willow ), is too busy rounding up peaceful natives for deportation to Florida. Meanwhile the hostiles, deserters from the US Army's native scout unit, have been reinforced by white renegades. Yes, the white people are made to look pretty bad in this. Meanwhile the native characters, with exception of the Brujah shaman who leads the hostiles, are shown as decent and honorable. That said, it does not go all-out like Bone Tomahawk and make the hostiles into a tribe of inhuman trogledytes.
This was directed by Ron Howard , based on a novel, and is more than just a stand-alone Western. It stands out out as a film with a top-notch cast shot on location rather than with green-screens, made by a mainstream director and not an auteur or a VFX technician. Unfortunately, if not predictably, it has fallen down the memory hole. However, it is a very watchable film.
The protagonist (
The Quick And The Dead (1995)
The protagonist (
Sharon Stone
) is a gunfighter in the wild west.
She rides into town, the cliched stranger in search of vengeance.
The protagonist (
Scorched Earth (2018)
The protagonist (
Gina Carano
) is a bounty hunter in a post-apocalyptic world.
The protagonist (
The protagonist (
Terror on the Prairie (2022)
The protagonist (
Gina Carano
) is a ...
The protagonist (