Film review: ‘The Grey’

Wolves beware: That’s a knife in Liam Neeson’s right hand - and broken-bottle shards protruding from his left.

Jeffrey M. Anderson

Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012 | 5:27 p.m.

The bad news is that Joe Carnahan’s The Grey is a good deal more serious than his previous two movies, the pulpy Smokin’ Aces (2006) and the silly The A-Team (2010). But the good news is that it’s a good deal less serious than most other wilderness survival movies. This genre has a tendency to get fairly metaphysical, sometimes annoyingly so: Alive (1993), The Edge (1997), Into the Wild (2007), The Way Back (2010), etc. Somehow Carnahan has found the balance between pulp and existentialism, and he has done it by making a movie not about man versus nature or man versus man, but simply man versus wolf.

Ottway (Liam Neeson) is a brooding, withdrawn rifleman, whose job is to shoot wolves that venture too close to an Alaskan oil drilling station. When the time comes for some R&R, a plane carrying the workers back to Anchorage crashes in the middle of the snowy wilderness. Only eight men survive, including Ottway, who takes the lead against the threat of canis lupus as well as the biting cold.

This might have turned into one of those stories in which men regress to a primal animal state. But thankfully, they remain men. When they manage to kill a wolf, they cook it and eat it while standing (not crouching) around the fire. And while the dialogue isn’t exactly David Mamet, it’s at least civilized throughout. Thus, in a business mainly focused on boys, The Grey is one of those rare movies that focuses on men.