Billy Bob Thornton has been performing for the reason that late Eighties, and has loads of under-seen gems in his filmography. Relying in your sensibility, 2015’s “Into the Grizzly Maze” may qualify, however both means, it is an fascinating entry within the Thornton filmography. This direct-to-video survival horror movie incorporates a surprisingly strong solid that, alongside Thornton, consists of James Marsden, Thomas Jane, Piper Perabo, and Scott Glenn. Extra engaging than that, nonetheless, is the actual fact it sees all of them face off in opposition to an enormous grizzly bear in Alaska.
In 1996, “Sling Blade” earned Thornton a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, thereby changing his life and establishing himself as a serious pressure in Hollywood. The person who had appeared alongside Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer in 1993’s “Tombstone” and appeared in one other of the best Westerns of the ’90s, Jim Jarmusch’s “Useless Man,” had lastly damaged via. Since then, Thornton has loved a massively profitable profession that included one other Oscar nomination and a number of high-profile roles. He now stars as sly West Texas oil man Tommy Norris in Taylor Sheridan’s “Landman,” which has been yet one more huge success for everybody concerned.
However even somebody of Thornton’s stature has gone the direct-to-video route at numerous factors, and in 2015 that is precisely what he did with “Into the Grizzly Maze.” The movie was directed by manufacturing designer-turned-filmmaker David Hackl, who beforehand labored as a second unit director and manufacturing designer on a number of movies within the “Noticed” franchise earlier than directing “Noticed V.” Maybe unsurprisingly, then, apart from being a ridiculous motion film, his second directorial effort, “Into the Grizzly Maze,” additionally has sturdy horror components.
Into the Grizzly Maze options Billy Bob Thornton and co. face off in opposition to a murderous bear
Everybody certainly remembers when Liam Neeson faced off against a wolf in his best action movie, “The Grey.” However for no matter purpose, no person remembers when Billy Bob Thornton hunted an enormous bear via the Alaskan wilderness.
“Into the Grizzly Maze” stars James Marsden and Thomas Jane as estranged brothers Rowan and Beckett Moore. As kids, the pair got here throughout a grizzly bear in an space of the Alaskan wilderness often known as the Grizzly Maze. Since then, they’ve grown aside, with Beckett turning into an area deputy and Rowan an ex-convict. After the latter returns house to Alaska, he reunites together with his brother and the pair find out about a sequence of killings within the woods close by. It is right here that Thornton is available in.
The “Landman” star performs Douglass, a hunter who arrives on the town to offer the usual “you do not know what you are coping with” speech à la Richard Crenna’s Colonel Trautman in “First Blood.” In Thornton’s case, nonetheless, he is not speaking a couple of deadly ex-Inexperienced Beret, however an enormous murderous bear who’s way more crafty than an everyday grizzly and “an enormous, nasty son of a b****,” to make use of Douglass’ phrasing. With the skilled tracker main the cost, Douglass, Rowan, Beckett, and Rowan’s ex-girlfriend Kaley (Michaela McManus) enterprise into the Grizzly Maze to save lots of Beckett’s spouse Michelle (Piper Perabo), who’s gone lacking simply because the bear’s murderous rampage reaches a fever pitch.
Into the Grizzly Maze is a unusually compelling entry within the Thornton canon
“Into the Grizzly Maze” hit video-on-demand companies again in Could 2015 forward of a restricted theatrical launch, after which it pale into obscurity. Right this moment, it is not fairly an underrated Billy Bob Thornton project on the level of his Coen Brothers movie “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” however it’s an fascinating curio within the Thornton oeuvre. For one factor, it has a good solid for a movie that ought to have been stacked with B-movie actors who type of resemble larger stars. It is also removed from the worst film in Thornton’s catalog (that honor belongs to crime thriller “London Fields,” which currently bears a lowly 0% Rotten Tomatoes score). “Into the Grizzly Maze,” nonetheless, presently has a disappointing however not disastrous 36% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The one “prime critic” who contributed to that rating was Chuck Bowen of Slant Magazine, who appeared to be fairly taken with David Hackl’s motion horror. In keeping with Bowen, Hackl “retains the movie buzzing alongside at a confidently brisk tempo” and builds in the direction of “a formidable climax.” Elsewhere, nonetheless, Simon Abrams of RogerEbert.com gave the film only one star and dubbed it a “Z-grade SyFy Channel film that additionally occurs to star A-listers.” In keeping with Abrams, this “boring man-vs.-nature movie” will finally have you ever “rooting for the wild grizzly bear” slightly than the protagonists.
Even with that in thoughts, it’s type of fascinating to see Thornton on this DTV movie, which arrived the yr after his standout flip as villain Lorne Malvo in season 1 of “Fargo” and the yr earlier than his Prime Video sequence “Goliath” debuted. Even in the event you’re an off-the-cuff Thornton fan, it is price a watch only for its odd place within the man’s profession.
