Susan Granger’s review of “The Grey” (Open Road)
Emotionally ravaged John Ottway (Liam Neeson) is a despondent loner. Stationed at a remote Alaskan refinery, where crude oil is prepared for commercial use, he’s a sharpshooter, protecting workers from roaming predators, like wolves. En route home on a transport plane filled with oil-rig roughnecks, there’s a horrific storm, causing a crash. Those who manage to survive are faced with a challenging trek through the snowy tundra.
Not only are they stranded in the harsh, merciless wilderness, but they’re relentlessly pursued by a pack of blood-thirsty wolves that, according to authoritative Ottway, are territorial, protecting their den. One by one, the men are picked off until it becomes obvious who will be the last man standing.
The subsidiary characters played by Dermot Mulroney, Frank Grillo, James Badge Dale, Joe Anderson, Nonso Anozie and Dallas Roberts aren’t given much of a backstory, so the emotional drama pivots around the Alpha actor, courageous Ottway, and his fond recollections of his estranged wife (Annie Openshaw) and his Irish father, whose poem becomes his mantra: “Once more into the fray. Into the last good fight I’ll ever know. Live and die on this day. Live and die on this day.”
While writer/director Joe Carnahan and co-scripter Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, who wrote the short story “Ghost Walker,” obviously did extensive research on lupine lore, biologist Maggie Howell, managing director of the Wolf Conservation Center in Westchester County, claims, “Wolves don’t hunt humans – they actually shy away from them…It’s not anything new for wolves to be portrayed as the bad guy in fairy tales and we don’t take it seriously because it’s fantasy, but this movie is supposed to be real.”
Photographed by Masanobu Takayanagi in rugged British Columbia, where several cast members got frostbite, it looks real. The wolves – a mixture of giant animatronic puppets, CGI and trained animals – are a constant threat. This is the second collaboration between Carnahan and Liam Neeson, who worked together on “The A-Team.”
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Grey” is an intense, survivalist 7, a big-budget gore-fest.
