THE GREY (Three Stars)

U.S. Joe Carnahan, 2012

It’s really fitting that this movie is called The Grey, because grey it certainly is—and cold, and bitter, and sunless, a suspense picture full of existential terror, untamed nature, overwhelming anxiety and relentless death, always a step or two behind. And wolves. And Liam Neeson.

What is The Grey about? Macho stuff. The all-male group. Fear. Death. Survival. What we like to call manhood. In the film, seven or eight men (the number keeps dwindling as the story goes on)—workers in an Alaskan oil refinery that seems to run on booze and machismo—survive a skull-shatteringly convincing plane crash in the wilderness, only to find themselves scrambling to survive. They’re in a fix: lost in a perilous land without traces of other humanity—trapped in a deadly realm of terrifying mountains and huge grey forests and vast chasms waiting to swallow you up, a world mantled with snow and ice and vibrating with an intense, bone-stripping chill you can practically feel as you watch it.

It’s bad enough to crash-land in a frozen wilderness, even one photographed this well by Masanobu Takayanagi (Warrior). But worse awaits them. As the seven try to find their way back to civilization, they’re hunted by a pack of huge, ravenous, but scarily patient wolves, picking them off one by one. These beasts’ eyes glow in the dark. They howl. They are huge: some of them CGI, some animatronic, some actual wolves. They are always there, tracking, watching, waiting to kill and feed and send one more cast member to oblivion.

Do real wolves act like this? Maybe not, according to Carroll Ballard’s classic pro-wildlife adventure Never Cry Wolf. But this movie follows the logic of Jaws, the logic of horror. The lost oil riggers have one thing going for them: Neeson, an unstoppable force in that previous action blockbuster, Taken (2008), here plays John Ottway, a wolf-hunter hired by the oil company to shoot any wolves that menace the oil workers.

A guy suicidal unhappy about losing his wife, but an ace wolf killer who knows his prey, Ottway just happens to be on the downed plane. So naturally he becomes head guy for the beleaguered survivors: a desperate bunch that includes Frank Grillo as brutal ex-con Diaz, Dermot Mulroney as the bearded intellectual Talget, Nonso Anozie as the sturdy black man Burke, and Dallas Roberts as the hapless Hendrick.

None of them, we feel, would last a day without Ottway. But he’s no conventional movie action hero. Eyes quizzical and hurt-looking, voice a low, measured, all-knowing lyrical Irish growl, Ottway dispenses wolf lore (keep to the trees, he says), shoots, helps his men live and also helps them die, all the while trying to outmaneuver the terror that pursues them.

You may wonder why these wolves don’t descend on the men and rip them apart,  despite the sometimes reassuring presence of Liam Neeson. The answer is simple. Though the movie often feels real—and though director co-writer Joe Carnahan (working with co-writer Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, adapting Jeffers’ own short story “Ghost Walker“) has made it into an absolutely terrific suspense show—it’s as real, some of the time, as our worst nightmares.

That’s why it was clever to cast Neeson as Ottway, after two recent suspense crime thrillers box office blockbusters, Taken and 2011’s Unknown, in which he played almost ridiculously invulnerable heroes, supermen who could seemingly take down anyone, brave any peril, vanquish any gang, kick any ass. Those two movies, though they were smash hits, struck me as ridiculous, almost laughably ubermensch-ish.

Neeson, who’s had a largely laudable acting career ever since he and Helen Mirren made Excalibur in 1981 for John Boorman, began making super-popular violent trash with Taken and Unknown, and he made it work partly because he was so obviously superior to it, because, though he had the leonine, muscular looks of an action hero fit ready for anything, he also had that extra element of brains and sensitivity, something that played against the nonsensical plots. The story of The Grey is more believable and interesting—or at least Carnahan and Jeffers make it more believable and interesting. The story is semi-pure Jack London and the dialogue, which tends toward Ernest Hemingway–James Dickey macho philosophy, is more engaging than anything you’ll find in Taken, or in Carnahan’s and Neeson’s last joint venture, the ludicrous TV knockoff, The A-Team. (We’ll forgive them, as long as they can follow up with a movie as good as The Grey.)

The movie, at its best, reminds you of such classics as Boorman’s and Dickey’s Deliverance, or Lev Kuleshov‘s London-derived Russian silent Outside the Law, or even a flawed but exciting show like Lee Tamahori’s and David Mamet’s The Edge, The Grey makes the wilderness a terrifying place. And it works, sometimes smashingly.

Movies that are supposed to scare the hell out of you by evoking the terrors of the damned, of Hell and all its demons, usually do little for me, no matter how many devils they pull out of their hats. But The Grey is a genuinely scary movie—whether it’s swinging us over that chasm (a really terrifying scene), or crashing that plane or siccing the wolves on the crash survivors. And by the way, as many have already suggested, you shouldn’t walk out before the end of this film’s final credits. The movie has a last zinger for you.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•