WELL THAT'S WHAT I DAMN WELL WANTED TO SEE!!! THAT'S WHAT THEY PROMISED ME IN THE TRAILERS!!!! I didn't want to see some melodramatic whining and pointless speculation about death, and adolescent philosophy. I don't want a man shouting at God because God doesn't behave like the genie of Aladdin's lamp, I want to see someone using the strength, ingenuity and will God gave him to punch some freaking wolves!

Once I realized that this was a movie about facing death (and mostly facing it like little bitches), and that the various tiresome conversations and so forth were not merely attempts to pad out an action movie with intellectual content, I knew EXACTLY how it would end, down to the last shot! The only way I would have been wrong in placing a bet, was after I realized what the final shot was going to be (Neeson glaring down the alpha), I recalled the TRAILERS all showed a subsequent shot of him charging into the fray against his lupine tormenters, which I figured must come after the glare scene, and which suggested I might also be wrong, and we might get to see some wolf-punching. Alas, my first guess was right, and that charge from the trailer was cut out of the movie.

I am getting pretty damn sick of Hollywood pulling this shit. For the excerable "The Change-Up" the trailer featured an amusing joke by Jason Bateman, which suggested this movie might actually go somewhere original, and take an alternative perspective from the usual adolescently-scatological-and-mawkishly-sentimental view of babies in comedies. That joke, which was funnier than ANYTHING in the final cut, was not in the movie itself.

Yes, they do, because it becomes utterly predictable once you cut through the false impression generated by the promotional material. There's a reason a film like this was dumped in the mid-winter release date/trash heap, rather than amongst the end-of-the-year Oscar bait.

And if you have any sort of real personal religious convictions or beliefs, this film is a pointless waste of time, as it is all about a typically shallow Hollywood screenwriter attempting to tackle a philosophical issue, with no real philosophical, moral or spiritual grounding.

Really, Hollywood utterly fails whenever it attempts to portray history or science, why are they given a pass for rehashing the same self-serving sniveling that occurs to each generation of rebellious teenagers, and which mature schools of thought dealt with and settled ages ago? Because Hollywood, among other institutions decided that stuff is all subjective and "personal" meaning whatever each person feels is right for him. In which case, why should I care what some glorified art student or short-story writer thinks in his own personal spiritual grapplings? Why should he be given theater space and marketing attention to engage in his self-absorbed regurgitation of his own uninteresting and irrelevant-to-anyone-else mindset?