‘Grizzly Falls’: Boy and Bear Bond in Tale of Adventure

A small sigh of relief, please, for this children’s movie with no fast-food tie-ins, no toy marketing deals, no future Halloween costume in sight.

But only a small sigh.

For while “Grizzly Falls” delivers action and adventure in the great outdoors, it leaves viewers longing a bit for the creature comforts of big studio pictures. No committee of writers smoothing out the bumpy dialogue here, no computer animator compensating for the acting foibles of a 1,200-pound grizzly bear.

The story, set in 1913, concerns a 13-year-old boy, Harry (Daniel Clark). After his mother dies, his father, Tyrone (Bryan Brown of “Breaker Morant” and “Gorillas in the Mist”), decides to take his son into the Canadian Rockies to track a grizzly bear.

Tyrone, a globe-trotting game hunter, doesn’t want to kill this particular bear--a concession to the animal rights groups, perhaps?--but just to “capture” it so it can be “studied.” But everything goes awry when the hunters wind up with two caged cubs and one very angry mama bear. Unable to free her own kin, the grizzly drags Harry--who fainted dead away at the sight of her--off into the wilderness.

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It is unfortunate that screenwriter Richard Beattie (working from a story by Stuart Margolin) both underestimates and overestimates grizzly bears. This one seems to manage a hostage trade negotiation, but stares helplessly at the flimsy cage that holds her cubs. Any camp counselor knows a grizzly would make kindling of that cage. Heck, so would the cubs.

OK, no one really expects strict realism from a movie about a boy carried off by a bear. And here, as in most kidnapping movies, the heart of the story is the relationship between abductor and captive. The kid follows the bear, which provides safety from other wild animals, and learns how to fend for himself. They fish. They eat honeycomb. They bond.

Meanwhile Tyrone and a Native American animal tracker, Joshua, try to catch up and rescue Harry. Tyrone has some issues of his own, which have something to do with his own father and maybe another grizzly bear, but it only amounts to emotional filler. Tom Jackson plays Joshua so far against the stereotype that, for adults, the performance will seem to border on parody. Rather than stoic, he is touchy-feely, always analyzing Tyrone’s emotions.

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What they should have been tracking was a better casting director. Here the producers seemed pleased to sign recognizable faces, and everyone suffers the consequences later. Passing reference are made to multiple residences for Tyrone and Harry--an attempt to pave over the conflicting accents of Brown (Australian), Clark (American) and Richard Harris (British), who plays Harry as an old man.

Director Stewart Raffill, who most recently made a violence-marred TV version of “Swiss Family Robinson,” isn’t scared to push the PG rating. Genet (Oliver Tobias), a mean hunter who works for Tyrone and wants to kill the bear, gets mauled. Wolves threaten Harry and Tyrone, and there’s lots of gunfire.

Cinematographer Thom Best never captures the glory of the Canadian Rockies, and the uncredited editing is jarring and unconvincing in key action sequences.

Hackneyed, too, are the scenes that bookend the film in which Harris as old Harry (he’d be 100 if he was 13 in 1913) retells the story to his grandkids.

All might be forgiven if, in the end, “Grizzly Falls” amounted to something more than a camping bedtime tale, but alas, it does not.

* MPAA rating: PG for wilderness adventure violence and some mild language. Times guidelines: Bear and other wild animals attack, threaten humans. Themes of parental loss.

‘Grizzly Falls’

Daniel Clark: Harry

Bryan Brown: Tyrone

Tom Jackson: Joshua

Oliver Tobias: Genet

Richard Harris: Old Harry

Providence Entertainment and Behaviour Worldwide and Norstar Filmed Entertainment Inc. in association with Le Sabre present a Peter Simpson and Allan Scott Production. Executive producers Mark Damon, Raylan Jensen and Georges Campana. Story by Stuart Margolin. Screenplay by Richard Beattie. Directed by Stewart Raffill. Running time: 1 hours, 34 minutes.

In general release.