The Grey

After the commercials touted THE GREY as another winter-released don't fuck with Liam Neeson movie, the slow paced, essentially depressing tone of Joe Carnahan's film could only come as a surprise. There's an intensity to Neeson here similar to that which he showed in last year's UNKNOWN and the film that started the Neeson-craze: TAKEN, but in THE GREY the intensity doesn't come from Neeson acting like a badass because he can, but because he has no choice but to put up that front. Crashing in the middle of nowhere with a few other roughnecks, Neeson's John Ottway quickly establishes himself as the man in charge. It seems to make sense as the survivors become aware of spectrally appearing wolves that  pick them all off one by one, for Ottway was a killer of these wolves in his life before the crash. But Ottway discovers his gun has been rendered useless after the crash, but he takes control of the situation anyway, handing out a couple of suggestions that seem good at the time, but doesn't really ever save anyone's life. What is apparent in THE GREY though is something other than a "wolves eat people one by one" kind of structure that's so prevalent in horror films. We don't declare most horror movies as existential because we know the structure, but for a film like THE GREY, we sort of expect Ottway and his crew to make it out alive. Instead, Ottway knows that he will die, and how he faces this is the strength of the film, which, for me, rose out of the lurid, oil rig lights, glaring wolf eyes, and searing rivers. There's a great style here because there's an attempt at showing something "real": how you're probably fucked if you crash around a bunch of fucking wolves, and a, perhaps unintentional, fantasy that comes out of those images. It could be wolves or it could be something else, but what matters here is that a group of men have to come to terms with the fact that they will die.

★★★★ out of Five