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In 2011, mixed martial artist Gina Carano headlined Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, a fairly taut action-thriller that made the most of its star’s physical prowess, even if it wasn’t quite sure what to do with her limited dramatic range. While Carano didn’t exactly wow critics as an actress, she displayed a natural talent as a stuntwoman and a toughness that leapt off the screen. Since then, she’s turned in a couple of solid supporting appearances, including Fast & Furious 6. In the Blood marks her second lead role, and it proves that while she’s still a force to be reckoned with in a fight, she’s not quite ready to carry a film on her own.
Carano plays Ava, a newlywed with a somewhat mysterious and violent past who’s enjoying a honeymoon in Puerto Rico with her husband, Derek (Cam Gigandet). Almost immediately, the couple runs into trouble when she starts (and impressively ends) a brawl with a sleazy nightclub owner. The next day, a zip line outing results in a nasty fall for Derek and a trip to the hospital, during which he disappears. Stymied by corrupt police and unhelpful locals, Ava relies on the brutal skills her father taught her to continue the investigation on her own.
In the Blood has all of the basic tools needed to be a pretty good low-key action flick, but it just doesn’t employ them very well. As she’s proven before, both on screen and in real life, Carano can sell a punch. She lights up when the film lets her cut loose. Unfortunately, those action scenes are few and far between. After the brief nightclub brawl, it takes nearly an hour for the action to take off again. When it finally does, director John Stockwell films them with the kind of choppy handheld style that has been the bane of so many action films over the last decade.
The film’s other major stumbling block comes from its inconsistent use of some genuinely interesting supporting players. Stephen Lang chews scenery with gusto in a couple of flashbacks as Ava’s father, a man who gives a whole new meaning to the term “tough love.” Had the film taken more time to examine his character—or even bothered to explain his twisted parenting approach—it might have gone a long way toward injecting some energy into a long, meandering second act. Similarly, Amaury Nolasco pops up toward the end as a local mobster who reminds the audience of how much fun villains can be when they’re really enjoying themselves.
That these problems sink In the Blood sadly comes back to Carano. She’s so good in the action beats that it shouldn’t take a Soderbergh-caliber director to build a film around her, but her limits as an actor become a serious liability without it. When she’s called on to sell the emotion of a woman who’s lost in a foreign country and who may have lost the love of her life, she can’t quite make it work. Maybe that’s something she can improve in time—but, for now, her evident talents are best suited for supporting roles, where fists speak louder than words.
