If you haven’t seen any commercials or trailers for The Grey (and God bless you if you haven’t, because the trailers have been ubiquitous), go ahead and check out this movie knowing as little as possible, because the marketing has been misleading and does this extremely well made movie wrong by selling it as an action film instead of what it really is. It is easy to see how this film will disappoint a large segment of the audience that turned up solely because they were sold an action packed man-punches-wolves movie, as this is more of a character-driven, sparse, intense survivalist film, and the bits of “action” might even be the worst parts of the film. But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here…
The Grey is the story of Ottway (Liam Neeson, Darkman), a man hired to protect the workers of an Alaskan oil rig from wolves – he scans the horizon and picks off wolves with his rifle when he sees them threatening to attack an employee, and it’s a lonely and depressing job in the midst of a lonely and depressing place. The oil rig workers are described as ex-cons, drifters, assholes and lowlifes, and Ottway feels right at home among them, a saddened and world weary loner, not even sure if he wants to go on living or not.
But when his plane ride home ends in a terrifying crash in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, Ottway discovers he does have a desire to live, and with a handful of fellow crash survivors, they have to figure out how to survive and get back to civilization by hiking through a vast frozen tundra with little to no food, no shelter, no weapons, and no help in sight. And then there are those pesky wolves.
What makes The Grey work so well is the fact that the characters are developed and fleshed-out enough that what happens to them matters, because we understand what they have to lose and we get to care about them because of how they conduct themselves and handle the situation at hand, and it’s all very well done. They took the time to write a good story with good characters and with interesting dialogue, and it all pays off in the end because it makes for a great little film.
There isn’t much “action” in the movie per se, as the few wolf attacks in the film are usually of the extremely close up and edited quickly variety, making it hard to see what’s going on inside the blur of images, so fortunately The Grey is not about the action and the attacks. And despite the lack of good wolf attacks (which was implicitly promised by the woeful marketing), there is a strong undercurrent of intensity and tension throughout the whole film. The specter of the wolfpack and what they want to do to these men hangs over the entire movie, and it doesn’t let up, a blanket of dread and fear covering everything and everyone.
This is the Joe Carnahan that made the most excellent cop drama Narc, as opposed to the Joe Carnahan that made The A-Team and Smokin’ Aces – character and drama over spectacle and action. With great characters, a good story, great acting, strong atmosphere, and the occasional almost-arthouse flourish here and there, The Grey is Carnahan’s best film of his career and gets 2012 off to a rather surprisingly good start, considering the dreck that usually comes out this time of year.
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