Musings: Painkiller Jane

by Summer
December 27, 2005, 8:22 pm | In Movies |

I just got around to watching the SciFi Original Movie Painkiller Jane. I’ve wanted to see it for over a year… ever since seeing a short promo for it during a longer SciFi Channel promo narrated by Sean Bean when it aired during the first airing of the miniseries for the new Battlestar Galactica.

The premise was interesting, but I was not entirely thrilled by the presentation.


Basic story: A female soldier exposed to a biological agent becomes impervious to physical damage, instead of dying a near-instant hemorraghic death like the rest of her squad. The Army wants to find out what agent infected her so they can duplicate the results (fully healing from bullet wounds in five days could be useful to them). Chaos ensues when she escapes the Army to figure out who caused the death of her team, and kill them in revenge. Oh, and there’s a mysterious biological warfare expert wandering the world trying to perfect a bioweapon, and he’s interested in the side effects his creation caused in Jane.

Sounds like it could have been a damn fine film, but it was so dry and lifeless that it didn’t hook me as it should have. I saw two of the surprise plot twists coming a mile away, so that was a disappointment that I figured them out so quickly.

It was based on a comic, and now I’m curious to find out more about that comic. I’m mostly curious to find out if anything was left out, because I can’t fathom any other reason why the movie was so dry and almost ploddingly boring.

5 Comments

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  1. Saw it myself, thought it was okay. I remember thinking they tried to go with style over substance, and they didn’t quite make it.

    Comment by fred — December 27, 2005 #

  2. Fast healing? Reminds me a bit of that 1986 TV pilot “I-Man” starring Scott Bakula:

    http://imdb.com/title/tt0091248/combined

    Am I the only one who remembers that? I think they showed it as part of that Disney Sunday night TV movie series, remember?

    Comment by David Moldawer — December 27, 2005 #

  3. Fred, on the scale of previous SciFi Channel Original Movies, it’s definitely on the higher end, but when I see what they used in the story, I can only imagine what they had to work with, then wonder why it couldn’t have been used better.

    It seemed like the style they were going for was disaffected youth laced with angsty attitude. There could have been a little more energy put into the acting.

    But don’t get me started on the plot convenience of the security breach by the bio-expert. It just wouldn’t be pretty :)

    Comment by Summer — December 27, 2005 #

  4. Now that you got me thinking of the show’s plot (or lack thereof) points. If I remember right there is a guy that was in her squad that ended up fighting her. How did he survive long enough to take advantage of Jane’s blood? And why didn’t they grab her when they got him?

    Comment by fred — December 30, 2005 #

  5. No one in her squad survived exposure.

    The guy who she was fighting in the mall was one of the bio-expert’s men. He got her blood because he infiltrated the facility. Then he took her blood and isolated what he needed, then he used that to make himself and his lackeys impervious too.

    Didja notice how her Colonel friend had been fatally shot at the mall meeting, but how her blood conveniently dripped into his wound, helping heal him?

    There’s only been one time when something like that has been done and I liked it, and that scene was in a 4th season Angel episode (with Jasmine).

    Comment by Summer — December 30, 2005 #

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