The sound design makes each hit feel appropriately painful - Ray and Rachel may know how to fight, but they also bruise and bleed - and while the editing has a zippy quality, it almost never cuts during the moment of contact, the way Hollywood movies often do, so each kick and punch lands with the appropriate impact. The camera captures hand-to-hand combat in close proximity, and while it shakes around to capture mood and momentum, it’s never disorienting. The father-daughter duo are trained kickboxers, and the film’s fight scenes pack a punch. Before long, Ray’s revenge mission against Keely, and his Indian billionaire benefactor Vinod Shah (Raza Jaffrey), reveals an even wider conspiracy, which leads to Ray and Rachel having to go on the run from various hitmen and mercenaries.
Momoa digs deep for this section, as a man torn between white-hot rage and full-bodied anguish - watching him keel over from afar is just as effective as closeups of him suppressing full-throated wails - though the film rarely returns to these emotional highs. The two more important prologues follow Amanda’s illness, and Ray and Rachel coming to terms with her death from cancer, after a potentially life-saving drug is yanked out of reach by dead-eyed, vest-wearing pharma bro Simon Keely (Justin Bartha) despite the efforts of a left-leaning, pro-Universal Healthcare politician, Diana Morgan (Amy Brenneman). However, Momoa is clearly more suited to the action and naturalistic dialogue later on, than the initial Terrence Malick-esque voiceover about time and family during these nature scenes. The disconnect doesn’t matter too much, since the film is still laying its groundwork. The central revenge story doesn’t get going until the film has dispensed with four different prologues, which vary from a poorly composited foot chase in medias res, to a series of impressionistic flashbacks in which Ray Cooper (Jason Momoa), his wife Amanda (Adria Arjona) and their teenage daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced) hike through the woods.