Double Dare Reviews

Amanda Micheli's documentary about the dangerous, exhilarating lives of professional stuntwomen is less a history of a specialty that scarcely existed before the '70s — men habitually donned wigs and dresses to double for women — than a portrait of two women, one beginning her career and the other in the twilight of hers. The grandmotherly Jeannie Epper comes from a long line of stunt performers and grew up in the business. Steven Spielberg calls the Epper family the "Flying Wallendas of film," and remembers that when shooting a large-scale brawl in his movie 1941 (1979), "there were Eppers flying all over the place. There were Eppers coming in from screen left, Eppers coming in from screen right... they were everywhere." A mother at 16, Jeannie divided her life between looking out for her children at home and looking out for celebrities on the set. Epper's most famous gig was doubling for Lynda Carter in the '70s TV series Wonder Woman, but she started out in 1957, doing stunts for the Western series Maverick and still hustles for work on features like 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS (2003). Lifelong tomboy and high-school gymnast Zoe Bell, a New Zealand native, was hired at age 18 to double for Lucy Lawless in the popular sword-and-sorcery series Xena: Warrior Princess. When the show ended in 2001, Zoe decided to try her luck in Hollywood, where Jeannie generously showed her the ropes. Stuntwomen, everyone agrees, have a tougher time of it than stuntmen. Newcomers like Bell no longer face the endemic sexism that pioneers like Epper battled, but they're subjected to the same unrealistic standards and resulting insecurities that afflict actresses. Women's costumes tend to be low-cut, sleeveless and/or leg-baring — there's nowhere to put padding, no matter how taxing the stunt — and stuntwomen are as likely to improve on nature with a little nip/tuck as the actresses with surgically inflated busts and whittled-down thighs for whom they double. As Epper's daughter, Eurlyne, struggles with a debilitating injury, Bell aces an all-important audition and is rewarded with a plum job: standing in for Uma Thurman in KILL BILL's (2003/2004) rigorous and extensive fight scenes. Micheli, an accomplished amateur athlete who made her first film about rodeo cowgirls, has enormous respect for these resilient, underappreciated performers. And after spending 81 minutes with the engaging, generous Jeannie and Zoe, it's hard to imagine anyone feeling otherwise.