Entertainment
Canceled Star Wars Actress’s Western Is A Brutal, Unrated Post-War Thriller
By Jennifer Asencio
| Published
The recent release of a trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu continues the story of the warrior hero and his young charge as they navigate, fight, and Force their way around the Star Wars galaxy. Cara Dune, played by Gina Carano, was an important character in this universe who was written off when the actress made some social media comments that Disney didn’t like. For comparing cancel culture to the Holocaust, Carano found herself canceled and fired from the original Mandalorian series.
She was scooped up by Daily Wire, the conservative news station, which was in the process of developing its entertainment division with fictional adult entertainment such as the movie Run Hide Fight. Carano’s project with the company was the western Terror on the Prairie.
Searching For Identity After The War
The movie takes place after the Civil War, starring Carano as Hattie McAllister, who has relocated with her husband Jeb (Donald Cerrone), pre-teen son Will (Rhys Jackson Becker), and infant daughter Bess to build a remote farm in Montana. Hattie’s wealthy family originates from St. Louis, and the devoted couple disagrees over whether they should persevere in their isolated independence or return to the city and kin. Jeb fought in the war but left the Confederacy for the Union.
Captain Miller (Nick Searcy) is also a veteran of the Confederacy and is now leader of an outlaw gang. When he and his gang stop at the McAllister homestead while Jeb is away, Hattie does what she can to keep the peace until it becomes clear the men have no intention of leaving. What results is a stand-off between Hattie and Cap and his gang as they siege her house to draw her and the children out. But what do they want with her, and will Jeb return in time to save his family?
Gina Carano’s Potential Doesn’t Match The Role
For Cara Dune fans, I’ll rip the Band-Aid off quickly and admit that Gina Carano disappoints. It’s not that she was not very good in this role as much as the role was not very good for her. Hattie is a wealthy city belle who loves her husband enough to have relocated to this desolate territory and a mother determined to protect her children. Carano does what she can with this, but too much about her general demeanor betrays that the actress is not some pampered princess, which tricked me for much of the movie into thinking that Hattie had fought in the war beside, or rather than, her husband.
Daily Wire originally signed Carano to star in an adaptation of “White Knuckle,” which is about an undercover FBI agent on the trail of a trucker serial killer, but wound up making this film instead, so if it feels like she was hired to do a different job, it’s because she was.
Nick Searcy as Cap was a magnificent blend of reasonable and depraved, convincing and conniving. He would have made a perfect foil to a heroine allowed to use more of Carano’s strengths, but against Hattie McAllister, he is overpowering in his sinister combination of religious conviction and murderous rage. The late Heath Freeman, who died before the movie was released, was tragically conflicted as Gold Teeth, one of Cap’s followers, who is so manipulated by the former soldier that he’s afraid to disobey.
Stellar Production Undermined By Pacing
Production-wise, a major strength of the film is in shots and sound effects that punctuate the farm’s isolation. The distant mountains and vacant fields around the McAllister homestead dominate the visual landscape for much of the film. No musical soundtrack plays through any of the movie until the moment before the credits roll, indicating a conscious choice of using only the wind whispering over the prairie and Bess’s crying as background music. This combination drives home that the terror in question isn’t just on the prairie but is the prairie and the distance it puts between Hattie and help.
This would have been effective had the script had pacing to match, but it was so uneven that when I paused to go refill my drink, I was stunned to discover that I still had almost an hour left to go. There is even a scene that is a perfect allegory for the plot’s movement: a chase on foot across a swiftly moving river through whose current the participants must slog. In exactly this manner, the movie gets in its own way by having interesting characters and motivations that are held back by taking too long to have them do anything and dragging it out when they finally do. Even the conclusion was drawn out for too long and in too many phases to be considered anything like a climactic event.
A Western With An Identity Crisis
Terror on the Prairie was trying to be a lot of things, but it wasn’t. Since it was an early entry in the Daily Wire catalogue, director Michael Polish was given the leeway to make an art film, but writer Josiah Nelson’s sophomore script should not have been that film. There are too many dissonant parts that never quite find their fit because the movie is never sure whether it’s a drama, suspense, action, elevated horror, or a Western piece, and tries to be all at once.
Nelson went on to co-write Episode 5 of The Pendragon Cycle, whose script, I previously wrote, was its greatest strength. I can now see how that episode made use of the better elements of character development in Terror on the Prairie; Nelson has great characters and shines when he gives them something to do, but he didn’t succeed with his ponderous Western.
Gina Carano’s next move is a return to the fighting ring against Ronda Rousey for a Netflix event in May. Carano made a beautiful frontier belle, but she is too good a fighter to pretend to be an amateur. It’s a pity the other project didn’t work out, because that would have been really good. Meanwhile, since Lucasfilm has recently changed leadership, will Star Wars fans get a revival of Cara Dune?
Terror on the Prairie is streaming on Daily Wire+.