When bodies start showing up in an Alaskan forest a local sheriff and his estranged brother go about find the bear before a seasoned hunter does.
It's hard not to draw comparison to other persons versus nature films, to it's credit it has a seasoned studded cast in what could have been the Jaws (1975) or Moby Dick of Bear movies. The location scenery and setting is captured wonderfully thanks to James Liston's cinematography. There's some grizzly scenes (no pun intended) of hard to watch dead bear cubs, body dismemberment and so on. Saw V director David Hackl offers an abundance of kills in the forest, lodge attacks and in cars. But even Hackl with writers Guy Moshe and J.R. Reher paint by number forced stereotype character backgrounds it oddly feels only as special as AVP Requiem's brotherly love and forest scenes mixed with Abominable (2006).
Veteran Scott Glenn, excellent James Marsden, Thomas Jane as a hunter character turned conservationist who butts heads with Billy Bob Thornton's hardened hunter can't fix the lack of tension or continuity of three editors. Neither can the fine looking actors including excellent Michaela McManus's Kaley and Piper Perabo as deaf love interest and photographer Michelle distract the fact that there's a TV air about the whole affair. Marcus Trumpp's score is however great coupled with some fine cinematography and the star, bear Bart, possibly related to the late Bart the Bear and his mother from Grizzly (1976) steals the show.
It's nowhere near executed as well as The Edge (1997) or Ghost in the Darkness (1997), nor does it say more about conservation than The Bear (1988). What could have been Jaws, is more Orca - The Killer Whale.
As a killer bear film on revenge it's up in the top five, but how many murderous bear films are there?
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