Is it a coincidence that this week sees the release of Ted 2 and Into the Grizzly Maze, two bear movies that couldn't be more different? While Seth MacFarlane's Ted is hardly what anyone would call cute and cuddly, the bear in David Hackl's survival thriller is more likely to eat Mark Wahlberg than smoke a bowl with him. Although it may be steeped in familiar cliches of the genre, the film serves as a...well, grizzly and gory throwback to the man vs. nature movies of previous decades.
Inspired no doubt by the tragic exploits of Timothy Treadwell (seen in Werner Herzog's documentary, Grizzly Man), Into the Grizzly Maze has many of the anti-poaching, pro-conservation messaging expected from nature thrillers, but uses Mother Nature's fearsome power to create an effective backwoods revenge tale. James Marsden leads a surprisingly starry and game cast as Rowan, an ex-con with a dark past who returns to his small Alaskan hometown to locate a friend (Adam Beach) who has gone missing deep in the "grizzly maze", a winding forest landscape even the bears can get lost in. He arrives just as a massive and aggressively vicious bear has begun laying waste to everyone in its path. Rowan's a hunter, but his sheriff brother Beckett (Thomas Jane) has hung up his rifle to become a conservationist at the behest of his wife (Piper Perabo), who is now lost in those woods. From their ideological differences to some kind of shared past trauma, the two siblings aren't anxious to put their differences aside to make a rescue and stop the bear, but of course that's what they'll do. Male bonding and excessive amounts of machismo are in order from top to bottom; just look at the rest of the cast which includes grizzled vets like Scott Glenn as Billy Bob Thornton. The latter plays an avid bear hunter who is eager to get out there and prove his mettle.
That need to highlight male toughness and human dominance over nature often clashes with the environmental message. It's made clear that this bear isn't out murdering for sport, it's essentially on a revenge mission acting as a defender of the forest against the poachers and loggers robbing us of Mother Nature's gifts. There's a gripping early scene in which a pair of poachers casually lop off the claw of a dead bear, then toss the carcass among a pile of others, including females and cubs. The killing of female bears and their cubs is one reason why grizzly bears are in such low numbers now. But then the bear is also excessively brutal and attacks its own kind for unspecified reasons, as well, and any deeper concerns the story may have are shunted aside for a traditional Jaws-type survival flick. On that level it's still pretty effective due to Hackl capturing the power and majesty of the killer beast, and building to a suspenseful showdown in which the outcome is genuinely uncertain. While most of the story beats won't surprise anyone, Into the Grizzly Maze is still slightly smarter than your average bear....movie.
Rating: 3 out of 5
