The Grey

Liam Neeson plays Ottway - a sniper hired to protect Alaskan oil workers from the various wolves that surround their base camp. Of course, a heavy snowstorm quickly is moving in, which forces them to evacuate. During the flight, the plane suffers some sort of malfunction and crashes. Now, abandoned in the middle of nowhere, the survivors have to start making their way south to civilization, but find themselves outnumbered by hungry hungry wolves.

Who will survive and who will be eaten?

Who will become wolfy chow?

I expect more out of Neeson. Maybe all of this felt more intriguing while he was reading the script, but I fear it was more intriguing when he was reading his pay check on the way to the bank.

Director/co-writer Joe Carnahan and co-writer Ian Mackenzie Jeffers fill the movie with plenty of clichés, but none of the compelling dialogue and backstory that would make The Grey a taught thriller about survival and the human desire to keep fighting in the face of adversity. We should be rooting for these guys to survive, not rooting for the wolves to eat them.

Carnahan gives us some flashes of what we want to see in The Grey, but not nearly enough. Ottway has a whole history to explain who he is and his current physical and emotional state, but that never becomes important enough to drive the apparent theme of human nature's desire to survive in the face of horrible conditions and probably death.

We have mostly boring dialogue between the characters as we watch the guy with a kid hoping to be with her, and the guy who is a better fit for jail than society trying to show how tough he is, and so forth and so on. Each one is taken down one after the other as we hope to see Neeson take on the wolves using a very particular set of skills, but even that doesn't live up to our expectations.

Worst of all, the wolves look phony. If you want the audience to get all scared, the predators need to be more ferocious than Scooby Doo.

The Grey is rated R for violence/disturbing content including bloody images, and for pervasive language.