The Grey
Starring Liam Neeson
Directed by Joe Carnahan

Grade: B-

To be honest, I wasn’t very excited about seeing this movie. In fact, the first time I saw the trailer I laughed my ass off. What a ridiculous concept. Liam Neeson is a fine actor who has stumbled his way into self-parody over the last few years. We all liked the first Taken so now he just feels he has to make movies where he punches things. So combine Neeson’s recent track record, a director that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence and a terrible trailer, and I assumed I had it pegged. After seeing it, though, I’m going to go ahead and chalk it up to another victim of mis-marketing. It’s a quiet, contemplative movie that deals more with existential crises than wolf vs man action. I’d say it’s sort of like Open Water, if being stranded in the ocean was a metaphor for the absence of God.

Neeson plays Ottway, an Alaskan oil rigger and a widower who’s on the brink of suicide. We know this because he reads us the suicide note he’s writing through the magic of voice over. A note to film-makers, 93 percent of the time you’re thinking about using voice over, don’t. He’s sad and writing something, then he goes to the bar for a contemplative drink, then puts a gun in his mouth. I’m intelligent enough to figure out that it was a suicide note that he was writing. Make me work a bit as you do with the rest of the movie. Then Ottway and some fellow riggers board a plane to Anchorage for some R&R time which means hookers and booze. All in all, it takes about 15 or 20 minutes to get to the meat of the action. The plane crashes in the middle of nowhere and it’s quickly established that no one will come looking for them, and even in the unlikely event they do, they certainly won’t find them. These men are on their own.

A nice clue that this isn’t simply another action movie is that the only woman in the cast is a flight attendant and she’s killed in the initial crash, and I don’t recall a single line of dialogue from her. A lesser movie would make her survive and thrust Ottway into the role of her protector, who then slowly sees his icy heart melting from her sheer feminine goodness. This doesn’t happen here, because she’s dead and we’re not interested in redemption.

The surviving men are trapped, and dying off pretty rapidly. Most are killed off by wolves, others by harsh conditions. There are some attempts to fight back against the wolves, but these are not bad-ass brawls or Schwarzenegger-esque action sequences. Instead, they’re desperate, fumbling attempts at killing their attacker. It’s pathetic and sad and human. Ottway is their leader and, just like every other recent Neeson character in recent history, he is the smartest and strongest among them. This is pretty fair though, as I imagine if I ever meet Neeson there would instantly be no doubt who was stronger and smarter. He’s a very intimidating man. The nice variation on that idea in this film is that, though he is smart and seems to act when nobody else will, all of his ideas don’t work and lead to disastrous results. Every decision that is made just leads them further away from hope. The wolves know how to survive in the frozen tundra, the men don’t, and the movie never pretends it’s the other way around.

All this builds to the climax. Now we’re getting to the wolf fights, right? Well no, not really. What we get is Ottway sitting alone, freezing and wet and terrified looking up at the sky and demanding that God give him something, anything. He deserves some kind of sign, some signal that this all has some meaning. When he gets nothing from God he says “Fuck it, I’ll do it myself.” This sets him on his final path and a delightfully ambiguous ending. Some people will want to know more, will want to know what happened. But whether he lives or dies is not important, hell he already accepted and embraced death in the opening shots of the movie, dying is not really much of a climax in that scenario. No, what matters is what “Fuck it, I’ll do it myself” means. Does it mean that he’s made his peace with God or that he’s shunning him? Does it mean that he’s accepted that there is no God and humanity is ultimately on our own or that God is real and simply demands that we forge our own path? Both of these answers are acceptable dramatically, but the fact that it’s unknown allows us to place our own prejudices on the subject matter. Religiously inclined people will see it one way while unbelievers will see it another.