In the Blood (2014 film)

Plot

In 2002, Ava, a 14-year-old girl from Bridgeport, Connecticut, is woken up in the middle of the night and sees her drug lord father murdered by two masked intruders, before grabbing a shotgun and gunning down the two assailants. Twelve years later, after a rough life and recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, Ava marries the affluent Derek Grant in Arlington, the two having met while attending Narcotics Anonymous gatherings. After the ceremony, the newlyweds fly off for their honeymoon to a Caribbean island where Derek's family owns a summer home. One evening, the couple befriends a young local named Manny who invites them to a nightclub where Ava gets into a violent fight with several patrons following an encounter with local criminal Big Biz. The next morning, Manny invites Ava and Derek to ride "El Vuidador" ("The Widowmaker") a mile-long zip-line in the rainforest. Once there, Ava, who's afraid of heights, declines to go down the line, but Derek does and his harness snaps while descending, making him fall to the ground. Ava finds him in the forest, unconscious and severely injured, but alive. Unable to ride in the ambulance with her husband, she eventually reaches the hospital, where staff deny that Derek was brought in. After realizing that none of the island's other clinics and medical facilities have admitted her husband, Ava goes to the police to declare him missing. Stranded in a foreign land, faced with inaction from the local authorities and suspicion from her father-in-law, Ava tries to piece together what happened and find her husband, whatever it takes.

Cast

Production

The film was shot in Puerto Rico from November 25th to December 26th, 2012. Although portraying a 26 year old, Gina Carano was actually 30 at the time.

Release

In the Blood premiered in the United States on April 4, 2014, through a limited theatrical release and video on demand before coming out on home video two months later. Internationally, the film received a theatrical release in countries such as Vietnam, Kuwait, Singapore, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, the Philippines and Japan while coming out direct-to-video in the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Germany and premiering on television in Spain.

Reception

In the Blood received generally negative to average reviews from critics. Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film an approval rating of 40% based on 40 reviews, with an average rating of 5/10.

Variety's Ben Kenigsberg called the film a "serviceable action vehicle", while on the other hand, Nick Schager in The Village Voice described it as a "subpar action movie", that is "grim" and "formulaic", while singling out Gina Carano’s "badass-beauty charm". In The New York Times, Andy Webster also praised Gina Carano but lamented that she was "trapped in B-film depths", hoping that someone would "give her a better script and director". Writing for the New York Daily News however, Elizabeth Weitzman was more critical of Carano, stating that while "an undeniably impressive force" she was "not convincing" as an actress, but noted that the film had "a strong supporting cast, some pretty scenery and a taut mystery". Brian Tallerico from RogerEbert.com gave the film one star out of four, writing that the "film history is filled with xenophobic tales of pretty Americans who disappear in foreign lands and the pretty people tasked with finding them".