Well, after almost a year-and-a-half of anticipation (and setbacks), Gina Carano’s Daily Wire film has been released. I watched the premier of Terror on the Prairie, and I have thoughts. I’m trying to keep this review spoiler-light, so I’ll try to only talk specifically about plot points that were already revealed in the trailers.
The basic premise of the film is that several years after the Civil War, Hattie (Gina Carano) has to defend her land and children from a gang led by a murderous captain (Nick Searcy) while her husband Jeb (Donald Cerrone) is away.
Let’s talk about the positives first. The acting in this film is great. Carano delivers possibly her best performance yet. Amazingly, child actor Rhys Jackson Becker (Hattie’s young son Will) is very talented in his film debut. It’s a tired yet true maxim that a story is only as good as its villain, and Nick Searcy is terrific as “the Captain,” a remorseless and relentless killer who masks his evil under a façade of pleasantry. He’s probably the best villain out of the Daily Wire’s collection of films. I admit, I was also impressed that the DW was willing to feature a very obviously Christian villain. It speaks to their commitment to putting entertainment before politics or ideology (unlike, say, Pure Flix—or whatever they’re calling themselves nowadays). More importantly, there really wasn’t a bad performance in the entire film.
The cinematography was also almost always great. All of the shots of the Montana landscape are absolutely gorgeous, even if it was a little hard to see what was going on during the night sequences. There are also a few great shot compositions, especially near the end.
This brings me to the pacing. Terror on the Prairie is about an hour and fifty minutes long (which is still fairly short compared to most Hollywood films these days). The pacing is fairly brisk, with each new development and complication in the stand-off between Hattie and the criminals coming quickly. My only issue here is that the quick cutaways to Jeb are somewhat pointless and do damage the audience’s opinion of him.
Speaking of issues, it’s time to do some critiquing. Aside from Nick Searcy, the other main villain is the script. Except for the introduction of Searcy’s character—which was brilliant and tells you everything you need to know about him—the writing of Terror on the Prairie…is flawed. Hattie as a character is decidedly a mixed bag. For the greater part of the film she’s perfectly fine, but when she first meets the captain and his gang, she was decidedly way too trusting, which grated on me. While the motivations of the captain of the outlaws are explained by the end of the film, his unclear goals for the greater part of the runtime are more confusing than mysterious. I also got the impression that the script didn’t know what to do with Gabriel-Kane Day Lewis’s character. Judging from what teasers hinted, he was supposed to have a bigger role in the film than what was shown in the final cut. There are also—unfortunately—several vague details of the plot that are only patched together near the end of the film, and even a few set-ups that are never really paid off.
This isn’t really a positive or negative, but I felt it was worth a mention that this film is most definitely an R rated flick (for some reason it’s technically rated TV-MA, which is the tv equivalent of an R). There isn’t any nudity and—unless I missed it—no swearing. However, there are some suggestive references here and there—and I haven’t even started on the gore. Terror on the Prairie holds true to its name, being an absolutely brutal flick. Blood abounds, so if you’re on the squeamish side of things (like me) you’re definitely going to need to look away a few times. This is not close to being a family-friendly film.
Still, the acting and cinematography are Terror on the Prairie’s saving graces. Even if it isn’t the great film that we all hoped it would be, it is still most certainly a decent one, and one that I would recommend.
America Forever,
Socrates Finch