Apparently this year’s lame version of the Oscar nominated 127 Hours – even going so far as ripping
off the childhood flashback scenes, Liam Neeson stars as Ottway, a sharpshooting Irish man a.k.a. Grizzly Man whose plane crashes in Alaska in the middle of nowhere with a group of oil-rigger men. Bad enough they have to survive the frigid
temperatures, now they have to survive being eaten to death by wolves!
The first thing that needs to be addressed is that there are constant flashbacks of Ottway’s wife who must be deceased. As an audience we can’t help but wonder if Neeson took on this cathartic role of survival-in-the-snow because his real life wife, the beautiful Natasha Richardson, died from a brain hemorrhage. Not to mention two years earlier, Neeson had a need to rescue his abducted daughter in the smash hit Taken. So he clearly wrestles with a need to ‘save.’
Before the plane crashes, the film opens on Neeson writing a note to his missing beloved. “I can’t see you, I lost you” and we’re anxious to know her story that we won’t learn until the final moments of this film. In the meantime, we’re stuck with the slow
demise of seven angry men who we can’t seem to like in the first place as they’re swearing, self-destructive and abrasive losers who don’t have a redeeming bone in their body. Only a couple of them – one played by Dermot Mulroey – seem worthy.
Neeson however, gives a tour-de-force shaken performance as the gentle giant trying to maintain peace among this posse.
The story seems often helpless and tedious except for one mountain climbing scene involving a rope.
Bty the time director, Joe Carnahan, brings us to the end, he’s somehow missed a beat and could have taken a cue from Oscar winner, Danny Boyle on how to bring home a film in 127 Hours. Instead we’re stuck too, for 1 hour and 57 minutes thinking it might be better if they just died already. Two tiaras