By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on DVDs: The Grey
CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: NEW
THE GREY (Three Stars)
U.S. Joe Carnahan, 2012 (Universal)
Fitting that this movie is called The Grey, because grey it certainly is—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 in the wilds. They’re in a fix: lost in a perilous land without traces of other humanity—trapped in a deadly realm of mountains and huge 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 the movie.
It’s bad enough to crash-land in a frozen wilderness, especially one staged so well by director Joe Carnahan and company and photographed so well by Masanobu Takayanagi (Warrior). But worse awaits. 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 monstrous. some CGI, some animatronic, some actual wolves. They are always there, tracking, watching, waiting to kill and feed and send one more cast member to hell or otherwise.
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 playing John Ottway, a wolf-hunter hired by the oil company to shoot any wolves that menace the oil workers.
A guy suicidally 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), and shoots,and 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 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 his own short story “Ghost Walker“) has made it into an absolutely terrific suspense show—it’s only as our worst nightmares.
That’s why it was clever to cast Neeson as Ottway, after 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 Übermensch–ish tall tales.
Neeson, who’s had a largely laudable acting career ever since he and Helen Mirren made Excalibur in 1981 for John Boorman, struck it rich with super-popular violent trash in 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. It’s semi-pure Jack London stuff, and the dialogue, which tends toward Ernest Hemingway–James Dickey macho banter and philosophizing 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.
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. 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 survivors. And by the way, you shouldn’t walk out before the end of The Grey’s final credits. The movie has one last zinger for you.
Extras: Commentary with Carnahan and the editors; Deleted scenes.