TBD | A bear goes ham on two brothers, a deaf lady, and Billy Bob Thornton. Directed by David Hackl Starring James Marsden, Thomas Jane, and Piper Perabo Review by Jon Kissel |
Half Captain Planet episode, half monster movie, Into the Grizzly Maze is a baffling exercise in discarded production budgets or an instruction manual for money laundering. What it isn’t is a credible story or a movie fit for release, despite the considerable amount of talent put onscreen. Billy Bob Thornton has both an Oscar and a credit for playing a bear psychologist. There’s so much great cultural output in the world. I don’t understand why anyone would waste their time on this.
The best thing I can say about Into the Grizzly Maze is that it doesn’t look as terrible as its useless flashback opening. Director David Hackl, which is his real name or is the Hollywood pseudonym he’s aptly chosen for himself, color codes his movie’s first scene neon green, withholds the resolution of the scene, and then never brings it up again. The scene’s utility is, I guess, to show the older brother sticking up for the younger brother, and then reverse it at the film’s climax when the brothers are played by Thomas Jane and James Marsden, or it’s just an ill-considered piece of non-informational backstory that Hackl didn’t have the sense to remove from his film. This is the first impression he chooses to make on the viewer, quickly followed by a ridiculous character intro of Marsden’s Rowan where he refuses to have sex with a prostitute, but not til after Hackl gets in a leering shot at her breasts. This woman and her abusive boyfriend quickly exit the film just in time for the main attraction to enter.
I’m not talking about Jane’s Beckett or Thornton’s aforementioned bear hunter/psychologist, but the bear itself, here credited as Red Machine and ‘played’ by Bart the Bear 2. Into the Grizzly Maze has some solid bear acting, as much as that’s possible. Ol’ Bart makes a lot of interesting noises that I would believe were prompted out of him, and he has some impressive action shots for his reel, but all the credit for that goes to whoever Bart’s trainer is and not Hackl. Hackl’s responsible for the cheap look of the film that numerous shots of natural vistas can’t cover up for. He’s responsible for getting nothing out of a cast that includes Scott Glenn and Piper Perabo, playing deaf and also nose-blind thanks to how clumsily she steps into a rotting elk carcass.
To strain for praise aside from the presence of a well-trained bear, Into the Grizzly Maze contains just enough to save it from an F grade. I’m a sucker for gruff outdoorsmen hiding away their emotions and then letting them out in a private moment, even when it’s told secondhand by Marsden. I’d rather watch the movie about that period in his character’s life than this bear-on-a-tear tale. Thornton’s best moment comes when he runs out of bullets as the Red Machine charges at him, and Hackl has the minimal sense to just wait a few seconds and let Thornton register his impending death. I’m now out of praise. This sucked and was about nothing and belonged on the Syfy channel. At least some emirati or oligarch got to wash his cash through Hollywood. Good for them, but bad for everyone else that is even aware of this trash. D
I’m not talking about Jane’s Beckett or Thornton’s aforementioned bear hunter/psychologist, but the bear itself, here credited as Red Machine and ‘played’ by Bart the Bear 2. Into the Grizzly Maze has some solid bear acting, as much as that’s possible. Ol’ Bart makes a lot of interesting noises that I would believe were prompted out of him, and he has some impressive action shots for his reel, but all the credit for that goes to whoever Bart’s trainer is and not Hackl. Hackl’s responsible for the cheap look of the film that numerous shots of natural vistas can’t cover up for. He’s responsible for getting nothing out of a cast that includes Scott Glenn and Piper Perabo, playing deaf and also nose-blind thanks to how clumsily she steps into a rotting elk carcass.
To strain for praise aside from the presence of a well-trained bear, Into the Grizzly Maze contains just enough to save it from an F grade. I’m a sucker for gruff outdoorsmen hiding away their emotions and then letting them out in a private moment, even when it’s told secondhand by Marsden. I’d rather watch the movie about that period in his character’s life than this bear-on-a-tear tale. Thornton’s best moment comes when he runs out of bullets as the Red Machine charges at him, and Hackl has the minimal sense to just wait a few seconds and let Thornton register his impending death. I’m now out of praise. This sucked and was about nothing and belonged on the Syfy channel. At least some emirati or oligarch got to wash his cash through Hollywood. Good for them, but bad for everyone else that is even aware of this trash. D
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