The Grey
It’s not January unless there’s a Liam Neeson thriller being released. Luckily for us, we can rest easy that the first month of the year is, indeed, here because Liam has a new movie for us called, "The Grey." Directed by Joe Carnahan ("A-Team," "Smoking Aces"), the film is kind of a return to the throwaway thrillers of the early 90’s that were moderately entertaining, but certainly nothing to write home about.
Here we have a suicidal man named Ottway (Neeson), mourning the loss of his wife, who is about to shoot himself when he hears a wolf howling in the distance. Clearly, this sets the stage for the film which is pretty much about wolves looking for human lunch.
Deciding to go on for at least one more day, Ottaway decides to go on an oil drilling assignment where he is to be in charge of keeping the wolves from attacking the workers. He boards the plane with a bunch of loud testosterone-y guys only to have the plane hit a bad patch of turbulence and - quicker than you can say "assume crash positions," - the plane goes down into the Alaskan wilderness.
A handful of men survive: Hendrick (Dallas Roberts) a sensitive type, the boastful Diaz (Frank Grillo), Flannery (Joe Anderson) a non-stop jabberer, Talget (an unrecognizable Dermot Mulroney) as the bookish family man., Burke (Nonso Anozie) a quiet hulk, and Hernandez (Ben Bray) who becomes something of a martyr. This rag-tag group thinks at first they are simply trying to survive the icy cold expanse of nothing, but soon enough they discover they are being stalked by a pack of wolves who see them as intruders.
Beautifully shot by Masanobu Takayanagi and with awesome sound design, "The Grey" looks amazing, but feels too familiar. There’s not much for wolves to do but surprise attack and while these moments make you leap out of your seat, there is a noticeable lack of suspense to the entire film. One sequence where the remaining men shimmy across a man-made rope-bridge is tense, but too short and comes a bit too late. By this point, we’ve been through an hour and forty-five minutes of endless talking, pontificating, and fighting that we’ve lost the ability to care. True, the men need to find their way out, but we don’t know where that "out" is so there is really no ticking clock. Therefore, we are left to wonder where the film is going.
There are some nice moments where the director tries to pump up the emotional subtext by flashing back to Ottaway’s childhood and visions of his loving wife, and there are some moving monologues, but that doesn’t ultimately save the film. Distractingly, the use of Jamin Winans theme from his own cult film "Ink" is off-putting when used in key moments of the film.
"The Grey" certainly isn’t a horrible film by any stretch of the imagination, and there are moments where you are gripping your seat. Had they cut out about a half hour, it might have been more of a thrill ride. I appreciate the attempts to make it mean something more than simply a "there are wolves behind you, run run!" movie and it’s worth watching on, say, cable, but a night out at the movies? Probably not. Unless you’ve forgotten what month it is and only Liam Neeson can remind you.
