Movie Review: The Grey (2012)

 

The Grey
A movie review by Dave Randal
January 28, 2012

Genre: Action | Adventure | Drama

Cast: Liam Neeson, Dallas Roberts, Frank Grillo, Dermont Mulroney, and Joe Anderson

Director: Joe Carnahan

Writers: Joe Carnahan(screenplay), Ian Mackenzie Jeffers(screenplay and short story "Ghost Walker")

Release Date: January 27, 2012 (USA)

Plot: In Alaska, an oil drilling team struggle to survive after a plane crash strands them in the wild. Hunting the humans are a pack of wolves who see them as intruders.

Want to know more about this movie?: The Grey(2012) IMDb Page

Liam Neeson may be pushing 60 years old, but the guy can still come off as a complete badass. I always knew of Liam Neeson, but I didn't realize he could play a really tough character until I saw him in the movie Taken(2008). The sequel for that movie comes out later this year and Neeson has a lot of other big movies coming out this year as well. He lives up to the badass image in his first movie of the year here with The Grey.

The Grey is about a man named Ottway who is hired by a petroleum company to watch out for and shoot wolves if they try to attack the oil rig workers. It doesn't say why exactly, but early on we find out that he and his wife are not together anymore. The oil rig crew gets on the plane to go home and on the way something goes wrong and they crash in the middle of the wild in Alaska. Only seven of them survive the plane crash and now they have to start walking and avoid a deadly wolf pack that sees them as intruders.

I wasn't quite sure if I was going to like this movie or not. I was afraid that there would be very little character build and that it would just be a very slow drawn out survival movie. It isn't like that at all. The movie has patience and takes it's time, but it uses suspense really well to make sure that it doesn't seem too slow. They introduce the wolf pack early on after the plane crash and make them a threat to the plane crash survivors almost immediately. Neeson as Ottway understands the wolves and takes on a leadership role among the survivors to help make sure that they stay survivors.

Just watching this movie can almost make you feel cold. The Alaska setting for this movie is great and makes it seem that much more brutal for the survivors. It works really well because the survivors not only have to deal with the wolves, but they also have to deal with the bitter cold.

The characters in the movie are pretty good, but they only concentrate on a few of them in detail. The movie pays the most attention to Ottway, but as the movie goes on it starts to develop some of the other characters as well. Developing characters in a survival movie is really important, because it lets you get into the movie on an emotional level rather than just an entertainment level.

The biggest threat in the movie are the wolves trying to rip them to shreds and it is totally believable with how brutal and ferocious this wolf pack is. The wolves look pretty scary throughout the entire movie. I know there were at least one or two times where I actually flinched and I usually never do that while watching a movie. You can get the feeling that the wolves are not going to leave the survivors alone until they are all dead, because the character of Ottway does a good job explaining about how the wolves feel like the survivors are trespassers on their territory.

Ottway tells the other survivors the best ways to fight the wolves and leads them so that they can keep on surviving. Ottway comes off really strong, but he also seems a bit emotionally vulnerable due to something that happens earlier in the movie. The interaction between the survivors is what really makes this movie work.

By the end I was very satisfied with this movie. It is kind of easy to predict what will happen, especially if you have seen the trailer, but I don't really think it hurts the movie that much. Overall the movie was very well made and I would say it is the best survival movie I have seen in quite a while.

Dave Randal's Rating- Rock On!!!
Learn the Rating System

Dave Randal's Star Rating-  ★★★★★(5) out of ★★★★★(5)