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