Monday at the Movies - February 25, 2013

Welcome to this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  This week, two films that (spoiler warning) should have been better.

The Grey (2012) – Somewhere between The Phantom Menace and Taken, Liam Neeson turned into a proper action hero to the point where he literally ran The A-Team.  Neeson rapidly developed a steady fanbase ready to follow him into any vehicle.  And the premise of The Grey, as initially marketed, is as tempting as any the man could possibly have accepted; the original trailers billed the film as, essentially, “Taken with wolves.”  “Come see Liam Neeson punch wolves,” the trailers promised, but when I finally caught up to the movie I got something entirely different – a somber character study of a suicidal survivalist up against a natural embodiment of death.  Neeson stars as the leader of a group of plane crash survivors who trek through the tundra in search of rescue, while a pack of wolves threatens their journey.  I try not to criticize a movie for being something other than what I was expecting (indeed, defying expectations is often a good thing), but The Grey was a bit misleading, promising a confrontation we never actually get.  Neeson is characteristically compelling as John Ottway, again toting a bag of skills akin to those he possessed in Taken, and his morose voiceover sells the narration, a filmic technique I often resist for telling and not showing.  Unfortunately, though, the film’s big antagonist – the wolf pack – never really looks convincing; I’m sure it’s a preemptive strike against animal cruelty folks, but the wolves are often stationary or shot in tight close-up, never giving them a proper sense of menace – or motion.  At the end of the day, Neeson turns in great work, per usual, but the film is certainly something other than what you’ve been led to believe.

Hobo with a Shotgun (2011) – Grindhouse, what have ye wrought?  Once upon a time, there was a clear distinction between movies and rubbish, but after Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino did a loving riff on the B-movie genre, the lesson learned seems to have inspired tasteless filmmakers to call their work “homage” and expect to get away with it.  Hobo with a Shotgun (itself originally a Grindhouse trailer) stars Rutger Hauer, grizzly as ever, as the titular residentially-challenged vigilante who aims to reclaim the streets “one shell at a time.”  While the film claims to be a tribute to the low-budget exploitation films of the 70s and 80s, what it really amounts to is a bloody mess of a thing, oversaturated beyond visual comprehension and unrelenting in its pointless violence.  Hobo with a Shotgun never reaches past its title, never dodges the generic clichés that dominate the script, never even surprises; the film is deliberately cheap and overly juvenile, teenaged Tarantino let loose in a warehouse full of fake gore with none of the wit or self-awareness from either Planet Terror or Death Proof – or even Machete, the other Grindhouse trailer-cum-feature.  Hobo with a Shotgun substitutes fun for bloodlust, assuming that the audience will delight in the director’s mania for dismemberment; on this account, perhaps they succeed, because a base feeling of revulsion is the only human emotion (not counting boredom) that the film managed to elicit.  Maybe I’m taking this too seriously; maybe I’m just too old for this.  But there’s little that’s earnest about Hobo with a Shotgun, and it’s a colossally unwatchable beast.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!