Listen to Danny’s Podcast: The Grey.
“The Grey,” starring Liam Neeson and directed by Joe Carnahan, has been marketed as “the movie where Liam Neeson fights wolves.” Keeping with the tradition of Neeson’s recent films – “Taken,” “The A-Team,” etc. – it appears to be another cheap and entertaining movie where the Irish actor displays just how much of a bad-ass he can truly be. But “The Grey” features some of Neeson’s best work and turns out to be a lot better than the trailers and posters would have an audience believe.
The film revolves around a crew of oil rig workers whose plane crashes in the Alaskan tundra on their way home from a job. They soon discover that they’ve landed in the territory of a pack of wolves who want to kill them off one by one. Luckily, they have Ottway (played by Neeson), the lonely “great white hunter” whose job with the oil company was protecting the workers from wolves. Ottway takes charge, leading the ragtag band of survivors in a struggle against the elements and the wolves. A viewer with a passion for wolves may want to avoid “The Grey,” since the wolves are big, bad and not portrayed in the best light.
But a viewer with a passion for Alaskan landscapes might enjoy it a lot more. Carnahan and his cinematographer, Masanobu Takayanagi, have given the film a stark and brutal look. They succeed in making the environment look pretty but feel painful. One drawback of their grainy and brutally realistic approach is that it’s sometimes hard to actually see what’s going on. Every wolf attack is so frantically edited that it’s not clear what’s on the screen.
From the looks of the film, Carnahan seems to have put his actors through the wringer. Neeson and company trudge through snow, wade through ice-cold rivers, fall from trees and get eaten by wolves. They look beaten up, uncomfortable and exhausted. No actor in this movie just “looks” freezing, they seem as if they actually are. This means they can put all their energy into “acting.” Though Neeson is the main attraction, “The Grey” is an ensemble piece, with every actor turning in a solid performance.
And all of those performances are given by men. There’s one woman in the movie, Ottway’s wife, and she has one line. “The Grey” joins the ranks of movies like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Master and Commander” as male-centric films about men doing manly things. “The Grey” is a Boy’s Own Adventure where the boys have beards and swear up a storm.
As good as the other actors are, this is a movie set in a world where people are divided into two groups: People who are Liam Neeson and people who are not. And this is where “The Grey” seems to fail and succeed simultaneously. Every single trailer, TV spot, and poster made “The Grey” look like another addition to Neeson’s list of paycheck movies wherein his mere presence elevates poorly-written material. Whether it was rescuing his daughter from sex traffickers in “Taken,” or releasing a Kraken in “Clash of the Titans,” all of these films played on Neeson’s image as an indestructible force of nature.
However, “The Grey” isn’t a poorly-written piece of disposable entertainment. It’s not “the movie where Liam Neeson fights wolves,” but a well-crafted story where Neeson plays a human being instead of a fighting machine. It’s disappointing how good “The Grey” actually is. An audience expecting “Taken 2: Wolves Edition” will be surprised to find something more. But they may also feel robbed of a battle royale between Qui-Gon Jinn and an alpha wolf.
