It Could Be Better.

 

Drag Me to Hell

2009

D: Sam Raimi

**********

Pros: One slightly funny moment, Good score

Cons: Horribly depressing, No good characters, Racism, Story does not support its awful moral, Not that funny

     

      I admit that my opinion of movies can sometimes be influenced by other peoples’ responses to them.  This is partially the case for Drag Me to Hell.  I first watched this movie expecting something fun from a former master of campy horror-comedy and honestly mistook it for a serious (if slightly campy) horror movie with a tragically depressing ending.  It essentially revolved around a woman (as well as a young child) getting undeservedly doomed to eternal fire of Hell without chance of redemption.  My initial reaction was more of the subjective disappointment that the movie wasn’t what I expected it to be, rather than genuine active hatred.  It wasn’t until later that people told me that this movie was, in fact, “funny.”  Oddly enough, this was supposed to improve my opinion on an inherently tragic event, but it reinforced my dislike of this film.  It was like my reaction when people justify their love of AVP: Requiem by saying, “I don’t think it’s a serious horror film, I just think it’s funny because I have a sick, disgusting sadistic tendency to laugh at watching small children and pregnant women killed by chestbursting aliens,” like that somehow saves face.  It makes me wonder why AVP:R trails this movie by 80% on Rotten Tomatoes even though their main appeal is that they're amusing to people who need to have their basements checked by the FBI.  Drag Me to Hell is seen by its fans to be a return to form by a once-great director.  If that’s what it was supposed to be, then it makes Prometheus and the Star Wars prequels look like resounding triumphs in that field.  If this is supposed to be Sam Raimi’s trying to be classic Sam Raimi, then it’s little wonder he gave up and made Oz: The Great and Powerful.  

        The movie opens 40 years in the past with a family taking their son to see medium Shaun San Dena (Flor de Maria Chahua) to exorcise him.  The child has been cursed by Gypsies after committing an act of theft against them, but due to some unexplained pettiness, they refused to lift the spell even after the family tried to return their possession.  San Dena’s séance fails, and the child is immediately dragged to Hell by demons in a rather terrifying scene.  It’s not funny cartoon Hell, either, just Hell.  The unparalleled agony of being burned alive for all eternity.  Let that sink in: forever.  For.  Ever.  And it happened to a child.  Amazingly, I have to explain why I’m offended by the very suggestion that this movie is supposed to be funny.

Above: humor, apparently.

The movie then takes us to present-day Los Angeles, where bank loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is competing with her completely unlikable coworker Stu (Reggie Lee) for a promotion when she is asked for a third mortgage extension by an old Romani named Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver).  There is one scene, however, in which Christine is tasked with training Stu on something, raising the question of why he's competing with her for this position.  Hoping to impress her boss (David Paymer), she denies the loan and Ganush responds by placing a curse on her, or more specifically on a button from her coat.  Worried, she turns to fortune teller Rham Jas (Dileep Rao, the only person in this movie who gets a happy ending), who informs her and her boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) that she is haunted by a demon.  It is the Lamia (v. Art Kimbro), which will haunt the owner of the button for three days until eventually dragging the poor soul into Hell.  Hijinks ensue.  At work, Christine projectile nosebleeds on her boss, who asks if any of the blood got into his mouth (his legitimate fear of catching a horrible disease is funny!).  Christine attempts to apologize to Mrs. Ganush, only to find out that the latter is dead.  Ganush’s granddaughter (Bojana Novakovic) callously tells her that she’s getting what she deserves (Gypsies are wonderful people!)   The soul of Mrs. Ganush haunts Christine, and the Lamia beats her up a few times. Fortunately, Bruce Campbell shows up with a shotgun, says an amusing one-liner and blows away the Lamia, who flies back with a few cartoonish backflips.  Oh, I’m sorry.  That’s what would have happened if the claim that this was “a classic Sam Raimi movie” wasn’t pure, unadulterated shit that had passed through the colons of a thousand bulls.  Instead, Christine attempts to appease the Lamia by stabbing her kitten to death.  Hilarity.

      Christine then employs an older Shaun San Dena (Adriana Barraza) to expel the demon.  Since her encounter in the first scene, San Dena knew that she would face off against the Lamia again, and this is her opportunity to make good after her initial failure.  She charges Christine $10,000 anyway.  In the resultant séance, San Dena manages to entrap the Lamia into the body of a goat, but he bites the hand of an assistant and possesses him before the goat can be stabbed.  The Lamia is temporarily rebuffed, but the exorcism was a failure and San Dena was killed during the events.  What a disappointing character arc.  This scene is cited by fans to be one of the funnier ones, due to the possessed goats’ speaking in the same stock dialogue spoken by every demon in every exorcism movie ever and the presence of a dancing demon.  I was a little too distracted by the inherent suspense of the situation to notice.  I know, I’m fucking insane, right?

      After this setback, Rham Jas tells Christine that she can make a gift of the button and transfer the curse onto someone else.  At first she considers giving the button to Stu, but changes her mind upon seeing how pathetic he is.  She briefly considers other random people, like a sickly old man (as if being ill indicates that he won’t mind eternal damnation).  She decides to give the button to the body of Mrs. Ganush, and succeeds in willing the envelope with the button to her.  She believes she is out of the woods and things are looking up for her.  While at a train station with Clay, she finds out over the phone that she has gotten the promotion because Stu confessed to stealing her work.  Clay tells her that he couldn’t find the collector’s coin he kept in an envelope (which was mentioned earlier in the movie), saying that it must have gotten mixed up with her envelope.  On cue, Christine is dragged into Hell by demons, leaving Clay with the button, which suggests that the curse will eventually damn him.  It’s an ending that’s almost as predictable as it is depressing.

       Watching this movie was like reading a Chick Tract.  Both depict afterlife is horribly unjust and cruel, doling out eternal damnation to poor, undeserving souls.  Unlike most people, I am far too put off by such subject matter to enjoy some cheese on the side.  Sprinkle some sugar on shit, and it still smells like shit.  I find it disgusting and unfair that someone would be sent to Hell just because of the whims of a Gypsie.  I know some people might tell me that “it’s just a movie,” but what is a movie supposed to do?  It’s a work of art that is supposed to provoke an emotion from its viewer, and sometimes have a message.  Considering that the central theme that the movie’s entire plot revolves around is inherently tragic and depressing, then why should I find it funny because of some intentional or unintentional comic relief?  This is why I don’t find Chick Tracts ironically amusing as many apparently do.  I might say that this is because I’m religious, but I don’t see how one has to believe in the afterlife to be shocked by the situation.  I would like to say that, unlike a Chick Tract, Drag Me to Hell is just a lark and does not reflect any twisted beliefs on its creator’s part, but apparently I cannot.  I love how the interview contains the classic "Your calling me bullshit on my bullshit just proves I'm right" logic.

        With this movie, Raimi was apparently trying to make the type of morality tale in which you relate to the character making the wrong choice, even though he arguably succeeded at making one already.  Stories that make sin relatable in order to provide a caveat against it are important, but it only works when the sin is really that bad.  Sam Rami really wants us to believe that Christine deserved eternal damnation for not giving a third extension on a mortgage to someone who gave no indication that she was going to pay it on time.  Such an action is extremely rare in this business, and anyone who signs off on such a deal arguably agrees to the realities of the banking world.  The movie conveniently ignores this, disingenuously framing it Christine’s decision as nothing more than “this old lady’s way of life vs. my promotion.”  Even if one were to consider this internal logic, would Christine’s conceding her promotion to Stu, who would almost certainly abuse his post and make the lives of her and her coworkers a living hell, be the right thing just because one person could not take responsibility for her delinquent mortgage payments and move in with her family?  Ganush clearly has a large family that is perfectly capable of taking care of her.  If they don’t feel like doing that, then they would be the bad guys in the situation and would have no right to judge the bank loan officer for doing her job.  Even if one were to concede Christine’s sin, she does not deserve the punishment.  And where the hell does the fate of that poor child at the beginning of the movie factor into this morality tale?  What about the properties of the curse that are decided by the one who cast it?  Christine is framed as the villain for trying to save her soul by resorting to measures based on rules that were imposed upon her.  The curse forces her to compromise her morals (sacrificing her kitten in spite of her vegetarianism, attempting to pawn the button off on someone else), to the point where her culpability is almost moot.  There is no provision for saving your soul through a selfless deed, as seen in All Dogs Go to Heaven or Bedazzled.  I'm pretty sure Christine's decision to not condemn Stu despite the latter's unlikeability qualifies.  Also,Ganush didn’t just curse Christine to Hell, she also cursed any poor soul who happened to end up owning it.  Ganush also seems not to care so much for the inherent wrongness of Christine’s act so much as the effect it had on her own self.  Also, if the movie's "humor" derives from our laughing at this poor woman's doom because she "deserves" it, then that not only makes the movie even more contemptible, it adds a level of hypocrisy to Raimi's supposed encouragement of self-aware soul-searching on the audience's part. 

       Amazingly, Raimi tries to pass off Ganush as the “victim,” ignoring the fact that a sense of victimhood, whether it be real or perceived, is a classic motivation for villainy.  Some of the most vicious and bloodthirsty people are such because they identify themselves as victims.  The disproportionate way in which she retaliates against Christine is more than enough to qualify her as the villain.  Raimi uses his claim to justify the potentially offensive depiction of the Romani people.  This is a highly dubious assertion on Rami’s part because only a crazy person would argue that Romani are depicted in a sympathetic light.  They are depicted as the worst people ever.  In this movie, they are evil sorcerers who use an inflated sense of victimhood to lash out against others for minor slights by cursing them with the literal worst conceivable thing that can happen to anyone.  It’s all just campy fun because it’s not like Romani still face prejudice nowadays.  I can’t help but think that Raimi is just saying Ganush is a victim as an afterthought to cover his ass on his terrible and offensive writing. 

       Another way in which this movie fails as a morality tale is its rejection of the very idea of redemption.  As long as someone lives, they have the opportunity to redeem themselves.  Yet Christine has no such recourse.  She’s given a scant three days to make good.  Her only conceivable chance at true redemption is destroyed when Mrs. Ganush dies shortly after the curse is set upon her, robbing her of a chance to apologize.  Instead, her salvation is dependent on digging her hole deeper.  Even making her do things that would logically send her to hell anyway.  Christine is literally damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.  This is disappointing when you consider the importance Raimi placed on redemption in Spider-Man 3.  Even Chick Tracts recognize the legitimacy of a deathbed recantation (at the expense of any other form of morality, though).  It’s not every day when a movie is so wrong that it inspires me to say something good about Spider-Man 3 and Jack Chick.  The absurd perversion of morality in Drag Me to Hell is enough to discredit any attempt to pass it off as an intelligent and well-written horror movie, and Raimi tends to Kafkatrap anyone who questions it.  To the credit of most of the movie’s fans, I hardly hear any of them backing Sam Raimi up on any of this crap.  They mostly seem to think it’s funny.            

      That being said, the movie isn’t really that funny.  I wanted to watch a classic Sam Raimi horror-comedy, and I simply didn’t get that.  It would take a lot of very strong humor to compensate for such a depressing plot, and the comic relief in this movie is disappointingly restrained.  I only remember one part in this movie that made me chuckle.  In the first scene you can hear the invisible Lamia bitchslap a random guy while trashing the room during the séance.  Hell, I think A Simple Plan is funnier movie simply because, in spite of the movie’s uncharacteristically serious tone, Raimi could not resist having one person blown into the air by a shotgun blast.  There are some cheesy elements and director trademarks, but they mostly serve as style rather than humor.  There are gross-out visuals and some intentional camp.  Not enough to work, but enough to spoil any serious tone the movie could have had.  The Classic appears as Mrs. Ganush's car.  However, the movie’s atmosphere is Sam Raimi-lite, as evidenced by the presence of bad CGI.  Nothing like the glory days of the Evil Dead series.  This movie fails not only as a movie, it fails as a Sam Raimi movie.  This is why I find it so baffling that it’s been embraced by the his fans.  You’d think that with such misplaced praise for one fallen creator, fanboys would have at least recognized that Titan A.E. was the first decent movie that Don Bluth had made in a decade.  Then again, what are humans if not collections of logical discrepancies held together by complex hydrocarbon molecules? 

      Camp and humor might not have been the right path anyway for such a depressing story.  While the Coens’ Fargo and Serious Man are ostentatiously dark comedies, I find their tragedy far outweighing their humor, much like in this movie.  Unlike this movie, the Coens depend on genuinely good, serious filmmaking to make intelligent movies.  You can’t just dress up the logical fallacies and depressing consequences of Drag Me to Hell’s story with camp and call it funny.  In effect, Drag Me to Hell is no jollier than Se7en, and I'd be willing to bet Se7en has stronger comic relief.  Perhaps if the consequences had been trivialized this might have worked.  Oddly enough, Raimi’s A Simple Plan demonstrated that he once realized this in a time before Quentin Tarantino used that voodoo curse to steal his powers a decade ago.  This is why Tarantino has basically been making Sam Raimi movies with better dialogue lately and why Sam Raimi hasn’t made a decent movie since Spider-Man 2.                    

     Long story short, I hate this movie.  The one good thing I can say about it (aside from its very rare humor) is that it has an excellent score by Christopher Young.  It’s also frustrating that I seem to be relatively alone in my opinion.  Even people who hated this movie seem to ignore its obvious flaws and dislike it for the wrong reasons (I noticed a similar trend with Shoot’em Up).  Many of them expected a serious horror film and found it too cheesy, while others clearly never liked Raimi’s movies to begin with.  I think it goes to show that Drag Me to Hell fails at both horror and comedy.  The only way Raimi could salvage this mistake is to admit it and maybe do a more genuinely light-hearted sequel to the movie, something along the lines of what he hinted at in the above interview.  After all, I believe in redemption.   

BONUS: My video review with Zucca for its 10th Anniversary 

Wolf Awareness Week II: Day 7

 

Alpha and Omega 2: A Howl-iday Adventure

2013

D: Richard Rich

**********

Pros: Some slight emotionality, Improved plot structure

Cons: Bad Animation, Flat characterization, Some crude humor

      Richard Rich has not had the most auspicious career in animation.  He started out decently by helping direct The Fox and the Hound, but he seemed to lose his way after co-directing on the financially disastrous Black Cauldron.   He spent the 90’s making middling third-party cartoons like The Swan Princess and now he specializes in 3D Direct-to-Video features.  If there’s one thing that demonstrates the wrongfulness of the death of 2D, it’s the animation quality of cheap computer-animated features.  3D animation requires a lot of work and money to look presentable, and some art styles don’t translate well into 3D environments.  The result is that many characters in these works will look very off-putting.  The movies themselves will often illustrate this point by showing 2D conceptual art in their credits, and that will look fine.  In the good old days, cheap ghetto cartoons at least possessed decent artwork, even if it might have had stilted animation sometimes.  This problem applies to Rich’s recent sequel to Alpha and Omega (which he produced).  The animation of Alpha and Omega 2: A Howl-iday Adventure is not only bad, but the rest of the movie is not too much to be proud of (despite the potential), and I say this despite being one of the few people who actually liked the first movie. 

       The movie establishes that Humphrey (Ben Diskin) and Kate (Kate Higgins) have had three poorly-named pups: Stinky (Kate Higgins), Claudette (Lindsay Torrance) and Runt (Liza West).  While the three pups are out playing, and Runt uses a unique ability to climb trees to spot a few rogue wolves.  Claudette and Stinky are separated from Runt when they are attacked by a bear (Frank Welker).   Unfortunately, the rogue wolves have taken the other pup, and it’s up to the protagonists to reclaim him.

In the wild, only the fittest get the hair gel required to survive.

       The rogue wolves are of a pack that runs on a policy of Alpha supremacy.  Their leader King (Blackie Rose) intends to use Runt to lure Humphrey’s pack so that he can destroy it and he tasks his daughter Princess (Meryl Leigh) with taking care of him until then.  I ended up liking Princess in this movie.  She clearly has misgivings about King’s anti-Omega bigotry, and her voice actress gives a good performance.  Perhaps she ended up having an Omega pup that suffered from the pack’s policy (a line seems to suggest this to me), which is why her personality is such.  Either that or she’s just angry that she’s been saddled with such a humiliating name.

      As Kate and Humphrey go to rescue their cubs, they experience the usual distractions in the tradition of the last movie.  They rescue a bear cub (despite Humphrey’s reluctance based on a bad experience in their first adventure) whose family ends up helping them in the final battle with the rogues at the end of the movie.  I will say one thing for this sequel: it does a better job of integrating side events into the main plot than the previous film.  The bear subplot is not only relevant to this movie’s story, it even seems to justify a bear encounter from the original that was so pointless that I didn’t even mention it in that review.  They also enlist the help of Marcel (Chris Smith) and Paddy (Eric Price).  I must say that Marcel’s character design is rather off-putting.  He looks like a middle-aged man who got stuck halfway while transforming into a goose (I’m not putting an image up on this page).  I guess that’s another reason why I didn’t like the birds in the first movie.  They help the wolves fight the rogues with a flyby poo-bombing, because every 3D anthropomorphic movie is apparently required by law to have at least one fart or potty joke.  I blame George W. Bush.  If not for this scene, I would have let this movie get away at least a 4-star rating.  In fact, I’d say that Alpha and Omega 2 would have been a perfectly presentable family movie if it weren’t for the terrible animation and the graphic moment of bird defecation.  At least Equestria Girls rescued it from being my least favorite movie of 2013.

      Despite their initial reluctance in doing so, Winston (Danny Glover) and Tony (Bill Lader, who does a terrible impression of the late Dennis Hopper) bring their packs to help.  They also bring Garth (Chris Carmack) and Lilly (Kate Higgins), who have spent most of their time living in the grasslands, which I guess makes them the lupine equivalent of hipsters.  There is an admittedly funny scene in which they fool the rogues into thinking they are “Super-Alphas” by having one wolf standing on top of another one who is walking in tall grass.  It’s an amusing image that’s particularly humorous because former enemies Winston and Tony are paired off with each other.  They fight the rogues and win with the help of the bears.  Princess abandons her pack to King’s shock.  I will note that the wolf characters in the Eastern/Western packs do not seem as well-developed as they were in the previous movie.  Though there was some decent chemistry between Humphrey and Kate, a lot of the things I liked from the first film were not developed further or even shown.   The characters didn’t show as much personality.  The idea of her grandchild being in mortal danger does not inspire any half-psychotic rants from Eve (Vicki Lewis), and I don’t think Lilly mentions turtles once.

        At this point you’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with the howl-idays.  Well, after the main conflict of the movie is solved, we get an epilogue in which Humphrey, Kate and the pups are traveling back home and have somehow gotten lost.  How they got separated from their pack and got in danger of freezing or starving is not explained.  It’s a complete non sequitur, and its only connection to the plot is that Runt uses his foreshadowed climbing ability to spot a potential place to rest.  It’s like they decided to make the movie holiday-themed at the last second.  They find the same gas station from the previous movie (which I also don’t think I mentioned).  Max, a worker who mistook Humphrey for rabid in the previous film, sees the wolves and, being reminded of his own family, decides to leave the house open and with food waiting for them because it’s Christmas.  The scene has a lot of heart, but I’m not sure why he didn’t call animal control or someone who would have known what to do.

      Alpha and Omega 2 had good potential and a promising plot, but some things brought movie down: the crude scatological humor, the tacked-on ending and, most of all, the animation.  It’s  a remarkably ugly movie in a visual sense.  Like many cheap third-party 3D movies, the imagery lacks a crucial amount of detail, the movement has an awkward feel to it and it’s clear that many of the designs didn’t translate well into a three-dimensional environment.  The color palette of the movie has an unintentional weird, low-saturation look to it, and the shading is terrible.  Particularly bad are the wolf pups, whose cuteness the artists went a little overboard with. 

There's no room for their brains.

Voice acting isn’t as good either, as very few of the original cast returned to reprise their roles.  The most noticeable exception is Danny Glover.  Perhaps this is the best he could get because people might be realizing that Glover is so blandly wooden an actor that he makes Russell look like Jim Carrey.  He does have a distinctive voice which arguably makes phoned-in voice acting his ideal niche.  The one most noticeable advantage this movie has over its predecessor is that it makes far better use of its scenes.  If feels like it has more substance in its scant 45 minutes than Alpha and Omega had in twice that time.  It might have even been an improvement if not for its fatal flaws.  This movie wasn’t much to review, but I guess that’s what I get when I commit myself to a gimmick like this. 

           

 QUOTES

KATE: Okay, parents’ first dinner.  Let's get this place in order. Oh Humphrey, can you move the logboard to the wall?

HUMPHREY: This is where we fell in love.

KATE: I know.  Against the wall. [Humphrey pushes log slightly] Completely against the wall.

HUMPHREY:  I don’t know, honey.  I think the angle makes it a little less…[Kate pushes log against the wall]…militant?

PRINCESS: Why aren’t you eating the rest?  Don’t you know how scarce meat is?

RUNT: I was leaving the other half for you.  You know, like sharing.  Nah, I guess it’s an Omega thing. 

PRINCESS: When we have a kill, those who eat are those who fight for it. 

RUNT: I’m sure the pups do really well under that scenario.

PRINCESS: [growls] The Alpha pups do. 

Wolf Awareness Week II: Day 6

 

The Grey

2011

D: Joe Carnahan

**********

Pros: Good direction, Visuals, Some good lines

Cons: General story’s been done before, Inaccuracies about wolves, Anticlimactic finale

      Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces wasn’t quite the action-filled comedy its trailers promised to be, but it was still an interesting and distinctive movie.  I wish I could say the same thing for The Grey, which also seemed to suffer from misleading marketing.  I thought Taken was not much more than a generic Bourne wannabe, but Liam Neeson proved to be a credibly gritty action hero in it, and the movie spawned a series of Liam Neeson action films.  With The Grey, Hollywood seemed to be unleashing him on wildlife, but the film turned out to be different from what people expected.

      The film begins in an Alaskan oilfield that employs John Ottway (Liam Neeson) to shoot wolves in order to protect the workers.  This doesn’t make much sense because, while wolves will raid peoples’ farms for livestock, they know better than to attack humans directly.  Despite this, we see Ottway shooting a lone wolf that attempts to rush a small group of oilmen, an occurrence that I suspect would never happen unless it was rabid or really desperate for food.  Afterwards, Ottway writes a letter to his estranged wife Ana (Anne Openshaw), who occasionally appears to him in dreams telling him not to be afraid, and attempts to commit suicide, but he changes his mind when he hears a wolf’s howl.

      The next day he boards a plane with a bunch of oilmen (Dermot Mulroney, Frank Grillo, Dallas Roberts, Joe Anderson, Nonso Anozie, James Badge Dale), but the plane crashes in the wilderness, leaving a miraculous number of them alive, including Ottway himself.  Finding out that his gun is broken beyond repair, he tries to organize the other survivors and faces some tension from the closest thing this movie has to another character.  Diaz’s (Frank Grillo) attempt to loot the dead bodies may be questionable, but it certainly doesn’t warrant Ottway’s threat of physical and potentially lethal violence.  However, our merry travelers have a bigger problem on their hands: wolves.  And not just any wolves.  These poor bastards seemed to have stumbled into a nest of Africanized wolves, because these things are total psychos.

     The movie’s depiction of lupine behavior might be appropriately described as…well…pure bullshit.  These wolves insistently pursue this group of humans despite not apparently getting much out of them.  Wolves are animals, but they act with rationality in regards to their survival.  Obsessing over a group of humans seems to be a bad way to do that.  You wonder why they don’t give up this apparently high-risk quarry or even take a break to take care of their young.  Instead, they chase down the oilmen, killing a couple, but mostly just menacing them ineffectually.  More men die as an indirect result of their actions, succumbing to hypoxia, drowning or gravity.  Ottway, who apparently has a store of erroneous wolf trivia, exposits that the wolves have a hunting radius of 300 miles.  Now if this was true, and if wolves were as ridiculously territorial as they are depicted in the movie, then Alaska and Canada would only have room for 11 packs:

 Assuming all of these packs have 42 wolves in them (which is an extremely generous estimate) that would make the entire population of wolves in North America about 462.  But then again, in this movie Canada could be the size of Neptune for all I know.  
      I know that some people might respond to this criticism by saying that I'm missing the point of the movie.  I would say that you could have made the movie just as good at what it was without this distracting amount of factual inaccuracies meant solely to serve the plot.  You could still have the same things even with more effort put into the writing to avoid this buffoonery.  It also sends a mixed message in regards to the uncaring nature of the wild if you make a group of animals unrealistically aggressive.  I'm also sure that the implausibility of all those people surviving such a horrific plane crash, combined with the absurdity of what follows (ignoring the wolf attack in the first scene), would provoke many to play the "Owl Creek Bridge" Card (i.e. most of the plot is the fantasy of a dying man).  Personally, I find this trope to be trite when used as knee-jerk headcanon, especially without the novely, edge and eloquent cynicism of Ambrose Bierce's short story.  

      Aside from the inaccuracies, there is one moment that might disturb animal lovers.   At one point, the oilmen manage to kill the Omega and they decide to eat it.  In a very questionable decision, the filmmakers decided to “prepare” the actors for this scene by feeding them actual wolf meat (frozen,not raw), which Neeson apparently liked.  I’m not an animal rights activist, but I might say that feeding a sentient creature to actors just so that a character can say he doesn’t think wolves taste good is overkill.

      While being haunted by these creatures, the oilmen are killed off one by one in rather pointless ways.  I know that’s kind of the point in this type of story, but there’s no challenge or impact in this if we don’t sympathize with the characters.  They’re all just like horror movie fodder with the exception of Ottway.  There’s a reason why the movie poster is nothing but Liam Neeson’s face; it’s all about him.  In fact he gets all the good lines, though Diaz occasionally tries.  When I hear him utter an attempt at a one-liner as cringeworthy as “I got a book.  It’s called We’re All Fucked.  It’s a bestseller” and “This is fucked city. Population: five and dwindling,” it becomes painfully clear that the movie really, really wants me to like him.  Note to potential writers: one-dimensional snarky characters only work if you can actually write clever things for them to say.  The men stop for a moment to discuss spirituality, and (surprise) Diaz is a cynical atheist.  Ottway also says that he is an atheist, but he wishes he could be a believer.  He tells the men about his father (James Bitonti, with Jonathan Bitonti appearing as a young Ottway) and a poem he wrote about facing every day like a battle for survival.  After this important exposition is out of the way, a little more wandering and dying is done until Diaz decides he’s had enough of the former and sits down to let the wolves or the cold take him.  Ottway continues with the remaining redshirt, who immediately dies in a tragically pointless manner.  Left alone, he angrily cries out to an uncaring or nonexistent God, and soon stumbles into wolves’ den.  It turns out that the men have been getting closer to it the whole time, but then again why didn’t the wolves simply circle around them to get between them and their home? 

       In the final climactic scene, Ottway realizes that the wolves have surrounded him and he challenges the Alpha, who acknowledges with a really good Kubrick Stare.

As he prepares for battle, he thinks of his wife, now predictably revealed to have died of a terminal illness.  He recites his father’s poem as a poor man’s substitute for a John Murphy score swells up.  He tapes mini liquor bottles between his fingers and smashes them open.  Now we finally get to see the climactic final battle that the trailer practically promised us: Liam Neeson punching wolves in the face with broken liquor bottles.  He begins to charge, and…that’s when the movie cuts to credits.  Practically the same time as when the trailer cut.  I mean the ending isn’t bad per se, but considering what I was expecting.  I mean I was expecting to see Liam Neeson punching wolves in the face, and that’s something Twilight delivered on.  This is really more of the fault of the marketing rather than the movie itself.  The movie truly ends with a brief mid-credits shot of Ottway and the Alpha lying on each other, exhausted and possibly dying from an even fight. 

     At its heart, The Grey is actually a pretty generic tragic/survival story, without much to set it apart from its brethren aside from the false promise of Liam Neeson action and zoology so profoundly inaccurate Doug Walker would pick up on it.  People die without point, as they do in real life.  Odds are stacked against hapless protagonists with no relief.  It’s a type of story that has done many times before many times better.  Its position on the existence of God seems ambiguous and open to interpretation, but the movie was apparently marketed toward Christian audiences.  Then again, that could have just been cynicism.  It seems that God helps those who help themselves in this story, and that man must fight to survive as any other animal would.  The movie’s main theme seems to be to never give up fighting till the day you die, and I quite frankly thought that Paul Stanley conveyed that message more effectively.

     Perhaps the best part of the movie, aside from some of Neeson’s dialogue, is the visual style.  Cinematography is great, and the depiction of North America’s taiga during wintertime is beautiful.  A lot of this may be due to the involvement of producer Ridley Scott.  In fact, this $25,000,000 film looks far better than more expensive CGI fare.  My favorite part was special effects work on the wolves themselves.  Greg Nicotero deserves a lot of credit for the animatronic work he coordinated on these creatures.  CGI was used sparingly, mostly for touch-ups.  If you look at production stills of the puppets, they do look a little fake, but you don’t see that onscreen thank to the clever lighting and camerawork.  It reminds me of things like Bruce from Jaws or the Xenomorph from Alien.  Filmmakers using their wits to work around problems and create thrills rather than allowing the machines to think for them.  It’s good to see that’s not a lost art.  The alpha in particular has an air to him that almost makes him seem like a character himself.  They not only look realistic (with the help of great camerawork), but also very sinister and expressive.  There are plenty of great shots of them in the darkness where we see only their glowing eyes and their breath.  The movie may not be great, but it is something to look at.  The directing style really does redeem the movie, and makes it effectively tense and emotional despite its lackluster writing.  Like The Dark Knight Rises, The Grey is very watchable and engaging due to its spectacle, but you don’t really like it when you’re not actually watching it        

         

            

MEMORABLE QUOTES    

[Diaz is trying to loot the dead bodies after the plane crash]

OTTWAY: I'm going to start beating the shit out of you in the next five seconds. And you're going to swallow a lot of blood for a fucking billfold.

OTTWAY: We're going to get a large branch and sharpen the end of it, and we're going to shove it up this thing's ass. Then we're going to eat it.

OTTWAY: My dad was not without love... but a cliched Irish motherfucker when he wanted to be. Drinker, brawler, all that stuff. Never shed a tear. Saw weakness everywhere. But he had this thing for poems... poetry. Reading them, quoting them. Probably thought it rounded him off, you know. His way of apologizing, I guess. And there was one that hung over the desk in his den. It was only when I was a lot older, I realized he had written it. It was untitled, four lines. I read it at his funeral. "Once more into the fray. Into the last good fight I'll ever know. Live and die on this day. Live and die on this day."

     

OTTWAY: Do something. Do something. You phony prick fraudulent motherfucker. Do something! Come on! Prove it! Fuck faith! EARN IT!!! Show me something real! I need it now. Not later. Now! Show me and I'll believe in you until the day I die. I swear. I'm calling on you. I'm calling on you! [pause] Fuck it, I’ll do it myself.