BEFORE: Edie Falco carries over from "Outside In". This is another "middle film", out of three movies with Edie Falco in them, but I choose to not drop this one, because the other two films I'm thinking of dropping look a lot worse than this one. But who knows, I could be mistaken.
This is also the latest in a collection of films that features attractive actresses playing assassins or secret agents, which is a thing that screenwriters seem to think is real, only I'm guessing that it probably only exists in the movies. I'd like to see some stats on how many assassins actually look like Maggie Q or Jennifer Lopez - I'm guessing that would make them stand out, when the most important thing for a secret assassin is probably to blend in. "Hey, Charlie, any rogue secret assassins in the vicinity?" "Nope, chief, just some woman who looks like J. Lo, so we're all clear for now..." Anyway, I'm keeping track of the movies that use this as a trope because I'll want to list them at the end of the year, and any work I do now just saves me time then.
THE PLOT: While fleeing from dangerous assailants, an assassin comes out of hiding to protect the daughter she left earlier in life.
AFTER: In case you're likely to miss out on the symbolism here, they really dumb it down for you - the assassin played by Jennifer Lopez hides out in Alaska, which is where everybody seems to go when they don't want to be found. If you're looking for somebody, it's probably the last place you'd look, so I wonder why more people looking for people don't just start there. But I get it, the state is really freakin' big, so even if you KNEW the person you were looking for is somewhere in Alaska, you could probably spend the rest of your life trying to find them - but then it's so cold and there's so much snow you'd probably give up after a time. That's all going to change thanks to global warming, I guess - more people who have been off the radar for years are going to be found once it warms up there and it's easier to look for them.
Anyway, in Alaska she could have a part-time job shooting wolves to control the population, but she doesn't want to do that. Funny, that she's fine with shooting people but not wolves, but OK, she's an animal lover and wolves aren't evil, they're just doing what wolves do. So near her lives a mother wolf and some wolf cubs (pups?) and the mother wolf would do just about anything to protect them, even put herself in danger to kill whatever's threatening them. So this is the movie's grand symbolism about her unnamed character, and you'd have to be blind and dumb not to notice it, they really hit you over the head with it. She'd sacrifice herself to keep her daughter safe, and she'll kill anybody who wants to harm her daughter, this wolf-mother.
At the start of the film, she's being interrogated by the FBI, she's a former sniper from Afghanistan who got mixed up with both a British army captain and a Cuban arms dealer, and was romantically involved with one or both of them, and I'm sure that wasn't awkward at all. When the FBI wants to know which one was her baby's daddy, she only replies, "she's mine", which doesn't really answer the question, unless she had a third partner. (Probably the only relationship history more complicated than this character's is J. Lo's in real life...)
Anyway, the British potential father, Lovell, attacks during her interrogation and kills almost all of the FBI agents, and stabs the pregnant mother. This leads to a premature birth and The Mother being informed that because so many agents died, she's lost all of her parental rights, her daughter will be placed with a foster family, and she needs to disappear. So, it's off to Alaska to work for a former army colleague, but first she gets one of the few surviving agents to send her a picture of her daughter every year on her birthday, and to call her if her daughter is ever in danger.
Twelve years goes by, quite quickly with the aid of movie editing, but eventually she gets the call, and a plane ticket back to the lower 48. A photo of the daughter was found in the possession of the Cuban arms dealer's men, which means he may know where she lives. The Mother sees her daughter in person for the first time, but it's through the lens of a sniper rifle, as she hides in a parking garage. Sure enough, the Cubans come for Zoe, and The Mother can't possibly snipe them all, so it's on to Havana to rescue her. But she can't return her to her foster family just yet, because they need to hide her in - where else - Alaska. But this leads to both some bonding time between mother and daughter, and also a lot of survival training.
Good luck getting one of today's woke teens to eat wild deer meat - she's probably a total vegetarian, and asking her to shoot one is completely out of the question. Yeah, this may take some time, because kids today are so soft they have no idea how to hunt. This seems about right, but they also don't understand that none of their food is cruelty-free, The Mother even enlightens her that wars have been fought over cashew production, so you can't escape where your food comes from or the violence involved in producing it.
They do try to send Zoe back to her foster parents, but it just doesn't seem to work - the first time she gets intercepted by that British captain, who might be Zoe's father (?) and the second time, the captain tracks them down in Alaska, and Zoe is SUPPOSED to escape, but she thinks she got enough survival training to come back and be helpful in the fight, only she didn't. So she runs right back into the "hostage zone", proving that she essentially learned nothing over the past two months. Well, at least this sets up some incentive for the big boss battle.
I didn't mind J. Lo as an assassin so much, she at least seemed knowledgable about shooting skills and survival skills - but maybe that was because her character was light-years smarter than her daughter, who doesn't even seem to understand that meat comes from killing animals. This actress just wasn't very convincing at all, she seems like the girl you hire when Kaitlyn Dever isn't available. Just saying.
Also starring Jennifer Lopez (last seen in "Monster-in-Law"), Lucy Paez, Omari Hardwick (last seen in "Sorry to Bother You"), Joseph Fiennes (last seen in "Hercules"), Gael Garcia Bernal (last seen in "The Limits of Control"), Paul Raci, Jesse Garcia (last seen in "The Starling"), Yvonne Senat Jones, Michael Karl Richards (last seen in "Overboard" (2018)), Link Baker, Todd Matthews, Mayumi Yoshida, Ryan Cowie, Olivia Lucas, Jay Cardinal Villeneuve (last seen in "The Revenant"), Mehdi Regragui, Noah Crawford, Fahim Fazli (last seen in "12 Strong"), Saif Mohsen (last seen in "Brightburn"), Damon Zolfaghari.
RATING: 6 out of 10 explodable snowmobiles
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