"Into the Grizzly Maze" is so grating in its retrograde chest-thumping that it might as well be sponsored by so-called Men's Rights "activists." Rowan (Marsden) comes home to Rowley, Alaska after a seven year absence. After mysteriously accepting a clearly-charted map of a nearby forest from a friend's wife, Rowan checks into a motel, and is soon arrested for beating up a local pimp (naturally, the pimp was hurting a cowering, defenseless prostitute). The man who arrests him is Rowan's brother Beckett (Thomas Jane), a mirror-glasses-clad deputy sheriff who joins Rowan on his rescue mission, but only because he too is looking for someone: his deaf conservationist wife Michelle (Piper Perabo).
Since "Into the Grizzly Maze" is set in the sultry, musk-slathered world of men, the film's female characters are either accessories and/or victims. Sensitivity is for sissies, as we see by the way that Michelle and Beckett's medic companion Kaley (Michaela McManus) repeatedly hurt themselves and get into trouble before either Rowan or Beckett can. It's up to the film's two male leads to beat trigger-happy tracker Douglass (Thornton) to the bear (Bart) that's stalking Johnny Cadillac (Adam Beach), the poacher-with-a-heart-of-gold that Rowan originally tries to save from the dense "Grizzly Maze" trail.
Much of Rowan and Beckett's squabbling is adolescent squabbling, the kind that Kaley wisely sums up when she rhetorically asks the brothers "What are you, twelve years old?" They are not twelve years old, but they do act like icons of Disneyfied pre-adolescent empowerment in scenes like the one where Rowan stands on a wind-swept cliff and looks off into the distance, as if the fate of the food chain rested on his broad, rugged shoulders. The weight of the film's moral dilemma rests on those shoulders, and the shoulders of every other character with a gun and a penis. Even Beckett, a character who is shown to be ham-strung by his wife's belief in humane animal treatment, is flat-out ineffectual compared to Douglass, a character who may be kill-crazy, but is also knowledgeable enough to provide the film with an accurate description of Bart's righteously pissed-off character.
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