"Hopefully they will leave us the fuck alone."
Widower* John Ottway (Liam Neeson) is not only at the end of the world, he is also at the end of his emotional rope. A professional wolf shooter working at an anonymous oil drill site, Ottway has decided to end his life.
Something (The howl of a wolf in the night, perhaps?) makes him stop, though. Instead he boards a plane to fly south, to wherever home is for him. Ottway isolates himself from the other passengers and drifts off to sleep. But his sleep is interrupted when the plane crashes into the ice and snow of Northern Alaska.
Only a handful of people survive the crash. How many of that handful will continue to survive, and what will be left of them if they do, comes into question when Ottway realizes that the plane has crashed inside the 30 mile "kill zone" of a wolf den.
There are two reasons why I could never allow myself to miss out on seeing The Grey on the big screen.
Reason #1: It's an Animal Attack Movie, which is the Action/Horror Fraternal Twin of the Monster Movie. It's a sub-genre that I have loved ever since I saw Jaws
Reason #2: Liam Neeson kicking ass. The cathartic joy of which was best summed up by a New Rule on Real Time's January 13th episode: "For now on all of Liam Neeson's movies must be titled I Am Going To Hunt You Down And Kill You."
While Neeson's character does some hunting and killing in The Grey, all of the major hunting down and killing is done by a genuinely scary pack of wolves. Although The Grey is a testosterone fueled adventure film at heart (the kind of testosterone fueled adventure film that tries to instill the manly man urge to grow some beard stubble, thump the chest, and throw a rock solid punch) it also invokes the kind primal terror found in Jaws. I will even go as far as to say that The Grey is the best film of its kind since Jaws.
That is not hyperbole, though. Believe me. There were several scenes in The Grey that scared the ever living crap out of me, and I was on the edge of my seat far more often than not. What elevates The Grey's scares is that not a one is of the cheap thrill variety. Each and every frightening moment is organic to the situation and director Joe Carnahan refuses to indulge in hackneyed horror movie theatrics. There is an honesty to the viciousness that makes it both breath taking and skin crawling.
If there was something that The Grey got "wrong" (and this will always be up for debate) it was the generic nature of the everyman survivors that surround Neeson's character. In retrospect I can see that, since Neeson's character did not know any of these men, and the movie is being told from Neeson's character's point of view, these men would be an anonymous collection of strangers to him. That being said, by the end of the film I still had trouble remembering their names. Nonetheless, the characters are easy to relate to and when tragedy does strike, it is felt and felt hard.
It has been a long time since I have sat through a move as exhilarating as The Grey. I enjoyed every minute of it and look forward to adding it to my movie library, when it comes out on DVD.
Three and a half stars out of four.
* I know that some will cry foul over my "outing" Neeson's character as a widower, as that fact is not revealed until the very end of the film. But, being a widower myself, and knowing that Liam Neeson is also a widower, the fact that the character is one as well will be blatantly obvious from moment one to all but the most emotionally deadened of viewers. The intense agony of his grief is palpable.
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