The Grey

Liam Neeson

Frank Grillo

Dermot Mulroney

Dallas Roberts

Joe Anderson

Nonso Anozie

James Badge Dale

Screenplay by

Ian MacKenzie Jeffers

Directed by

Joe Carnahan

117 minutes

John Ottway (Neeson) works for an oil refinery in Alaska, as a guard, killing off wolves that get to close to the oil drillers as they work. He is an assumed recent widower, his wife having died from cancer. He writes a suicide note and goes out into the wilderness to kill himself when he gets a flashback of his wife comforting him. He stops and returns to base. The employees are to be ferried home by plane the next day.

All the men are anxious to get back home and we are loosely introduced to a group of workers. One of whom after being annoyed by Ottway’s reluctance to conversation begins to annoy the entire plane with his nervous talk of them all dying in a crash. It doesn’t help that they are flying in the midst of a blizzard.  Sure enough the plane does indeed crash with a horrific realism I haven’t seen since the plane crash/nightmare scene in Fight Club. Another vision of Ottway’s wife brings us back to reality.

He and a few members of the work crew managed to survive, including the yutz who “predicted” the crash. Ottway’s survival skills kick in and he gets the men to work together to try and figure a way out. They are hundreds, possibly thousands of miles from civilization in frigid conditions. To make matters worse, a pack of grey wolves have moved in to pluck them off. At first Ottway thinks they’re just doing what is natural to them, but then surmised they may have crashed too close to their den. And wolves don’t play if you’re too close to their turf. A mass of pine trees are off in the distance and Ottway thinks if the group can make it to the forest; they may be out of the danger zone.

The Grey worked for me on a few levels. One is the amount of realism with which the situation is handled. Not that I have EVER been in a plane crash, freezing tundra, or wilderness, but it didn’t feel like Neeson’s character was a superhero and new exactly what to do. He had foibles that any one of us could have if we were in his shoes. Also there was not one throw away character. You ended up having emotions for all of them.

Having said that, The Grey pulls one Hollywood trick I despise. Making you feel for a character that is absolutely loathsome. On the outset your first emotions are at base level. You hope the wolves not only kill him, but you get to see him torn apart. But as the story progresses Ottway who has read this fool from A to Z breaks him down making him more palatable to you the audience.

I like Joe Carnahan as a writer and director. He’s had a few misses in my opinion, but this is his most solid work since Narc.

Final Verdict: Worth It