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 2019, Vicky Jewson (Lady Godiva) -- Netflix

Maybe someone can help me out with this. This movie was doing the trailer rounds for a while, and part of my recollection, at the time, was, "Haven't this been done already? Didn't Noomi Rapace already play a black-suited bodyguard before?" I swear, I have an image in my head of a TV show that had her playing a bodyguard, working with a partner, a man in a similar black suit, protecting a client in one of those classic expensive houses on top of a hill, all glass and stone. I looked at her IMDB history and no such TV show exists, so the only thing I can think is that there is an actress who is Noomish who played such a character. Maybe we can work together to identify...

Anywayz, yes, Noomi plays Sam Carlson, a character based on real-life body guard Jacquie Davis, a lone wolf figure, low on the EQ scale but reknowned for how good she is at her job. After an almost botched job in Sudan, she is shaken up, but takes on another protection job that seems simple enough -- protect the daughter of a recently deceased mining tycoon. She's a bit of wild one, so hiring a woman (who won't sleep with the client) seems smarter. Of course, almost immediately the compound (said glass and stone house from above) is attacked and the two women barely escape alive.

This movie felt a little like Extraction, in that its a small movie, focused on two people escaping from Bad Guys, in a country unfamiliar to North Americans. Is this now a sub-genre? But whereas the former was more focused on the action, as all Leading Men movies are, this was more focused, more tightly narrowed in on the conflict, the tension between the two women, initially because the client doesn't want to be protected, but later because the two need to rely on each other. This movie also gave a bit more intrigue, the conflict between the tycoon's daughter and her step-mother (it's always a STEP mother), a misdirection on who is responsible for the attack, and also the more vague trauma (body guards / mercenaries always have a dark past) that Carlson carries around. In the end it delivers exactly what it professed to do, which is not bad, but I would love to see Noomi become the next John Wick.

And thus begins, unintentionally, another episode of Women with Guns. Another episode? Apparently almost all the movies I would place into that category were washed away but one hiatus or another. I wonder if it was part unto not wanting to admit my fondness for this genre.