IN THE BLOOD

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND BOREDOM

The first time I saw Gina Carano was in Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, essentially a Cynthia Rothrock movie that somehow just happened to have major A-list talent behind and in front of the camera: the likes of Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas and Ewan McGregor did the acting and Carano punched everybody spectacularly in the head. Even more spectacularly, she also got to beat up Michelle Rodriguez in the deliriously enjoyable Fast And Furious 6. Against those films, what a contrast to this shoddy, atrociously shot cheapie that conspicuously fails to showcase former mixed martial arts champion Carano's ability to pound seven bags of soot out of people.

In The Blood has newlyweds Carano and Cam Gigandet honeymooning in the Dominican Republic (it's actually shot in Puerto Rico); with the exception of a fight in a nightclub run by Danny Trejo, they're having a pretty good time until Cam falls from a zipwire and the ambulance never brings him to any of the hospitals. Kidnap? Murder? The police even think she might have arranged it to inherit his money (he's rich, she isn't, and they both had a history of drug addiction). Obviously she has no alternative but to track her missing husband down by herself, which inevitably leads to several scenes of her inflicting pain on a succession of increasingly obnoxious villains....

It's directed by John Stockwell, who has a track record of efficient action thrillers in exotic locales: Into The Blue (the Bahamas), Paradise Lost (Brazil), Dark Tide (South Africa). By contrast, In The Blood is drab: it has a cheap digital look to it, and the numerous fight scenes are very poorly shot which is a pity because Gina Carano is very good at fighting. You wouldn't shoot elaborate dance numbers like this, so why grace an equally intricately choreographed combat sequence with the production values of the behind-the-scenes featurette on the DVD? It throws away the one thing the film had going for it, killing it stone dead.

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