Movie Review: 'Rising Wolf'

Rising Wolf stars Charlotte Best as Aria, a young woman who has been kidnapped. Aria is trapped inside an elevator; only the doors won’t open. This being a very modern elevator it has a video wall on the back, one capable of being used to live stream and a camera where Aria can be seen by her captors. As the story of Rising Wolf unfolds we learn that Russian gangsters have kidnapped Aria’s father, Richard (Johnny Pasolvsky) and they want him to reveal a state secret.

To get Richard to talk they’ve trapped Aria in an elevator inside of an as yet incomplete high rise somewhere in Shanghai. The building has 120 floors and when Richard refuses to talk the Russian baddies drop the elevator at high speed several floors at a time, rag dolling poor Aria around the cabin. Richard however, still refuses to give up his secrets. Thus the lead baddie, Doctor Thompson (Andrew Jack) tries another tactic.

Instead of sending Aria up and down until all her bones are broken, he chooses to torture Richard and make Aria watch. The plan is get Aria to plead with her father to reveal his secret and stop the torture which includes such classics as punching him repeatedly while his arms are tethered to the ceiling to pulling off his fingernails one by one. Richard however, is revealed to be a former CIA Agent and thus this type of torture is something he’s trained for, we assume.

Aria meanwhile, can’t remember anything before waking up in the elevator. In between being bounced around like a rubber ball and watching her father get his teeth pulled out, much of Rising Wolf is about Aria slowly regaining her memory and realizing that she has some extra special abilities. Aria may be able to travel through time and she may have several other abilities that the movie hints at but fails to fully establish.

Aria may also have a twin sister whose abilities are even beyond her own. Several flashback scenes appear to show the sister blowing up a factory using only her mind. Aria appears to plead with her sister to keep her from further destruction while the dialogue also hits on the notion that both Aria and her sister are eco-terrorists with very different ideas about how to fight back against pollution and climate change.

Rising Wolf is an Australian production that was once released over a year ago under the title Ascendant. The Samuel Goldwyn Company in America picked up the movie for an American release and may have chosen the new title Rising Wolf to avoid comparisons to similarly themed YA movies like the failed Divergent series which had planned to use the name Divergent Ascendant for it’s final, cancelled, chapter.

The film was co-written and directed by newcomer Antaine Furlong and you can sense from the ending of Rising Wolf that hopes were high for this as the start to a franchise. A twist near the end of Rising Wolf hints heavily at a young adult series of films about a pair of sisters on a quest to fight on behalf of the environment. That hope for a franchise sadly goes by the wayside because Rising Wolf is a mess as just one movie.

You can certainly sense where high expectations came into Rising Wolf as Antaine Furlong does demonstrate a good eye for action, under the limited circumstances of a character trapped in an elevator for most of the movie. Furlong uses his set well and uses color well and star Charlotte Best is a capable lead actress who is deeply let down by a hackneyed and malformed premise. The half baked environmental storyline is hampered further by plot choices both poorly executed and dimwittedly predictable.

Charlotte’s main advantage in the film is that she has managed to hang onto her phone. Her kidnappers don’t appear to know that she has it. She uses the phone to piece together how she got here and to communicate with her Uncle Jack, a man who may or may not be her actual Uncle. He’s clearly an operative who has worked with her father and is trusted by the family but it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes’ levels of deductive reasoning to figure out what’s up with Uncle Jack.

In the end, sloppy plotting, vague motivations, and an insultingly simple twist sank any hopes Rising Wolf had of becoming anything more than a failed one off action movie. I’m not writing off Antaine Furlong however, I think there is hope for him yet. Perhaps working with a stronger producer or screenwriter might allow him to develop his talent for visual filmmaking and fix his problems with plot and motivation. Furlong still has potential even if Rising Wolf is a rough way to start a career.