Netflix’s Warrior Nun Is Pretending to Be a Lukewarm CW Show

It Never Rises to The Level of Its Own Derivative Cliches

Sometimes Netflix can give us some movies and TV shows that keep us enthralled from the moment it presses play. We love Lucifer and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and we stood on the edge of our sofa for Sandra Bullock’s heart pulsating movie, Bird Box. So we know Netflix can produce some hits and it can rescue some hits. Such is not the case for Warrior Nun in its first season run ten-episode premiere.

The Warrior Nun moniker sounds like it was born in the ’80s and made by the Israeli film company Golan-Globus/Cannon Group who gave us such film titles as Revenge of The Ninja, Fist to Fist, The Delta Force, Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, and Gas Pump Girls. Some of the titles sound like porn films if you’re not careful.

With Warrior Nun bestowed on this series, you’re already assuming certain things if you went by the trailer and you’d be oh so wrong. Warrior Num is a comic book adaption of Warrior Nun Areala by Ben Dunn. The trailer was presented was a deceptively insidious magic trick of the lowest order because what you saw was not what you got.

To begin with, Warrior Nun stars people whom you never heard of. The lead performer is a woman named Alba Baptista. Her character is Ava, a quadriplegic 19-year-old woman who has been in an orphanage since she was seven after she and her mother were in a car accident that left her mother dead. Ava’s first scene is that of a dead girl. Her death was attributed to suicide but we come to learn that this wasn’t the case. Her body is in the basement of a religious order. The Warrior Nuns, there is an order of them, have just returned from a battle that has left one of them, their leader, gravely injured. The Warrior Nuns are battling evil forces as they are after what they are calling, the halo of Adriel. As the contingent of evil makes their way into the inner sanctum of the church, Sister Shannon, played by Melina Matthews, carries the halo embedded in her back. As the forces move closer, Sister Shannon lay dying as Sister Beatrice, played by Kristina Tonteri-Young, comes forth with what looks like a branding iron and removes the halo from her back. She takes off with the glowing halo as it is held fast in the branding iron. A bad guy tackles her and the halo is knocked loose to the floor. He attempts to pick it up and you understand why Sister Beatrice has transported it with the branding iron. The bad guy picks up the halo and his fingers immediately dissolve.

Sister Beatrice retrieves the halo and continues her journey to the basement and places the halo in the back of dead Ava as a temporary hiding place. There are some decent fight sequences in this scene as we watch Ava flinches her way back to life. As she returns to the living, she wakes up to the battle with a newfound ability to use all four of her limbs again. So, what does she do, she takes off. Now here is where this series starts to go off the rails and I place every aspect of this derailment on the writing.

For the next four episodes, Ava is a poorly written character. In this first episode, we go along with Ava as she gives an internal monologue about what she is experiencing. For someone who has just risen from the dead and is walking around town, she is rather composed and not grasping the entirety of what just happened and why? As a viewer and a person with working common senses, the main thing you are asking yourself is that twelve years, Ava’s muscles have not worked so there should have been some serious muscle atrophy involved. She also should have had some weight loss in her legs and armed and also demonstrated some weight loss with her body and some bedsores judging by who took care of her. Ava pops up full-breasted and ready to go. We move off these glaring observations that have been overlooked or ignored and now this show has become a formulaic checklist of teenage angst issues. We see them being checked off one by one. The first checklist, the prospective love interest. Ava runs into JC, played by Emilio Sakraya, a grifter of sorts who, along with three of his friends, take up residence in luxury homes while the people are away. Ava joins JC and company as they take up residence in these people's home, wearing their clothes and eating their food. Here is where Ava is just a one-dimensional character. Her current concern is hooking up with JC. But here is the flip side of that. She’s never had a sexual experience, not even kissing, and yet this is the focus. You want to like the character but she makes it too easy not to like the character because the character is too involved with her won selfish needs to care about the ramifications of her reborn life or her absence of the quadriplegic life. She’s enjoying the lifestyle JC is giving her.

JC and company abandon her at a party they crashed and somehow, he finds her on the beach days later. That’s just too convenient and improbable to fathom.

This drawn-out exposition goes on for four episodes. There is little Warrior Nun action and when there is, it’s sparse. The saving grace in character development goes to Toya Turner who plays Shotgun Mary. Shotgun Mary is not a nun but is a warrior in her own right and knows how to use a shotgun, thus the moniker, as she does effectively on the bad guys. I would have preferred more action with her and Sister Beatrice’s fighting style. We do get to see that in later episodes but that’d short-lived. It seems as if the producers of this show were looking at the insurance premiums and deciding that it was too expensive to shoot more than two action sequences in an episode so they just brought back the drawn-out exposition thing again.

The checklist thing continues, Ava and JC have sex, and the whole “she’s a virgin” thing is never discussed. JC is never mentioned again after the demon shows up and she takes off running away again. Why did they devote so much time, emphasis, and five episodes to this character only for him the completely vanish? There is the requisite bad guys' checklist. There is the double-cross checklist. There is the “she’s a dumb as cotton candy” checklist and “she’s a naive twat” checklist as well. Overall, this felt worthy of being a CW show in the Supergirl/Batwoman vein in that it’s totally convoluted and saddled with poor writing.

To be fair, the Ava character is poorly developed. The path she takes is purely illogical. The self-narration is annoying and should be eliminated and is unnecessary. This was nothing more than a paint by numbers teen wannabe drama with nothing left in the tank. The strange thing about Warrior Nun is that it ended on a cliffhanger but after seeing these ten episodes, do I really want to make a return visit if the writing doesn’t improve and I mean, hire some writers who know how to write action and not waste time with seven and a half episodes on exposition, long, drawn-out, adds nothing to the plot, boring exposition.