"HOLD THE DARK"......EVERYTHING BUT THE WOLVES YAPPIN' AT HIS HEELS.......

Hold The Dark (2018)   Until we came across this one, we thought the last word in blood-drenched Alaskan Noir was "Wind River" with Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen.......

                 Hardly. "Hold The Dark" makes "Wind River" look like "Mamma Mia 2"..........

                 We're right back in the remote, frozen landscapes that have left the inhabitants not only drained of warmth, but of any traces of humanity.

                  The author of a book on wolves (Jeffrey Wright) responds to the plea of a young woman (Riley Keogh) who begs him to find the wolf pack who carried off her little boy.  This gruesome event happened while Keogh's battle hardened U.S. Army husband (Alexander Skarsgard) was deployed in Afghanistan, stoically blowing away insurgents......among other people.......

                  We shouldn't go any further than this in the plot description, since the film fairly revels in its eye-popping twists and sudden, surprising bursts of spectacular violence......

                  The gloom and dread hang heavy in this ongoing nightmare........and even though the dialogue is startling in its pretentiousness and not anywhere close to how real people speak, we got a kick out it anyway..........it sounds like the overheated crap you'd read in a first novel by some pompous twit freshly armed with an MFA in Creative Writing.

                  The film maintains its effective dark mood until it completely flies off the rails in its obsessive-compulsive love affair with gunfire and splatter.  About halfway through, the film stops in its tracks to enjoy an endless, sustained  Tarantino-Sam Peckinpah-worthy gun battle...…..as if the director's attempting to work out his own personal issues in the middle of his movie.

                   And then the film lurches on to its utterly depraved strange finish, with Wright rasping out his lines as if he's in the throes of terminal throat cancer and Skarsgard glowering through a trail of senseless carnage in his wake.

                   (Now you can understand why we borrowed the title of this post from that killer line in "All About Eve".....in which Thelma Ritter cracks wise about Anne Baxter's melodramatic backstory....)

                   We guess we'd call it watchable...…..but then again, so is a terrible traffic accident you'd slow down to take a guilty gander at...…..2 gory stars (**)……..from that cold, cold climate that gave you Sarah Palin...….