Eight Below
Directed by Frank Marshall
Let Viggo Mortenson rehash the tired clichés of fantasy and thrillers. Moviegoers with hearts, minds and eyes know that Paul Walker is a more significant movie icon. Walker confirms his movie star status with Eight Below. As explorer Jerry Shepherd, Walker and his team of sled dogs offer Disney family film survival instructions to children. But a moral lesson also sinks in through Walker's emotionally-earnest, sexy adult appeal.
Director Frank Marshall understands Walker's charm and frames it right, along with Jason Biggs' less glamorous but no less companionable and ethical presence as Shepherd's sidekick. Eight Below enhances what in lesser hands would merely be Disneyana; the secret is not anthropomorphism but a natural, inquiring humanism. In this way, Eight Below recalls the humane genre revisionism that occurs in Running Scared (the other jab in Walker's current one-two punch).
Both films quote familiar genres (In Running Scared it is The Cowboys from 1971, here it's the animal film) to contest how movies typically exploit danger as entertainment-an instance of cultural diminishment that corrupts the heroic genre conventions. But through Walker, a man's individual virtue informs both movies.