The Grey

Liam Neeson is an actor that has strangely decided to type-cast himself. Despite being a pretty great actor in the right kind of film, he has been associated with several forgettable action movies that paint him as a bland action star that is only capable of producing one-note portrayals of the same thing over and over again, with the 2008 film, Taken, starting this spiral downwards. While he’s proven himself capable of doing some heavy-hitting roles where he can miraculously work through his monotone voice to deliver some emotional performances, these type of movies like Non-Stop, Unknown, The Commuter, Cold Pursuit, and even eventually the Taken series, made people think he’s just a one-note actor, and The Grey is another in the long list that kept this mindset in many people’s minds. After experiencing a devastating plane crash, a group of oilmen get stranded in Alaska. A marksman named Ottway (played by Liam Neeson) decides to take charge and look after the remaining seven people left alive as they wait for help. However, it turns out that they aren’t alone in this frozen wasteland as wolves start to stalk them from the dark, slowly waiting to pick them off one by one. With no hope of being saved and with it only being a matter of time before they become wolf chow, the group decide to head for the forest and continue trekking on to find civilization, hopefully before the wolfs find them. For a movie that is pretty infamous as the ‘’Liam Neeson Wolf Movie’’, it doesn’t really do much to fight that headline as it has nothing else to offer outside of a bunch of wolves tracking Liam Neeson. The film did manage to do well critically and at the box office despite the rather weak premise, but it’s still kinda staggering how little is gained from this movie and how much it baffles its viewers with its decisions and choices. Its somehow both wildly unimpressive and yet ridiculously annoying at the same time. One out of many, but still an underwhelming Neeson flick.

The film is based on the short story ‘’Ghost Walker’’ by Ian MacKenzie Jeffers, who also co-wrote the screenplay along with Joe Carnahan, the director of the movie who directed movies like Smokin’ Aces, The A-Team and Narc. Despite the book not having much different from the eventual film, its shorter length and stream-of-consciousness narrative style would allow for a better experience than what this movie delivered. Considering it was a short story, it gives reasoning for the simplicity and rushed nature of the plot, the forgettable even nameless characters and ambiguous closing note, as it’s a format where those tricks can be worked around, which is not the case for a film. It’s a movie that should feel bleak, harsh, and gritty to the point of mirroring real-life, but instead the movie is painfully unrealistic and takes what should feel suspenseful and just make everything almost comically silly. There are several times in this movie where people do the stupidest things that only serve to get them killed and there’s a million other options to get out of them. The choices they make, the dialogue they spout to each other, the methods of surviving, they feel ridiculous and instead of feeling like these people are being picked off one by one by nature, it instead feels like nature is naturally selecting these dumb people to die. When the only thing this movie has going for it is its concept and they fail to deliver with it, it’s going to leave a sour mark that can be felt throughout the whole movie. The idea of the only threat being surviving nature and a pack of wolfs is a solid one for a survival movie as it’s not an idea that has been done in a mainstream film with a reasonably big actor, but because of how unrealistic it feels and how annoying it is to be around these people, it’s not given the appropriate atmosphere a concept like this deserves. The ending is also a massive let-down; having to wander through such boredom only to find out that the one element that could give this movie something cool (a fight with an alpha wolf), was cut it out of the final product, it feels like its intentionally trying to disappoint its audience as it gains nothing from keeping it out of the flick outside of a budgetary issue.

The characters are one of the most important elements when writing a survival story; they are the individuals that you’re stuck with for the entirety of the movie and need to be relatable and likeable to the point where they feel like real people, have developed backstories so that we know how they lived before this experience, and exhibit enough charm and personality so that we like them and don’t want to see them die. So, it becomes a real problem when all the characters in this film are bland, stupid, forgettable, and incredibly painfully unlikable. Despite going through an almost two-hour movie with these seven people, there is nothing worth remembering about any of them or a desire to want to know more about them for that matter. They are the most stock characters in any survival movie, and they are given so little identity that they either quickly get killed off, so they don’t need to be developed, or are only identified by being associated with a minimal element (a cough, prison, daughter, etc). Even Liam Neeson’s character has nothing to chew on except the fact that he has a dead wife; they are completely forgettable. But it doesn’t just stop there, they are also just dumb unlikable people, who spend most of the time making bad decision that get themselves or others killed, or just spend their time arguing and yelling at each other. When you don’t care about your characters and only make them unlikable, why would anyone care if they make it out alive? The acting overall is fine and while its not an A-list cast, there are a few recognizable names in here like Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts, Joe Anderson, James Badge Dale and Nonso Anozie, but nobody leaves a good impression or feels properly utilized, even Neeson’s role feels better suited for a Harrison Ford type instead of himself.

Probably the only thing this movie has going for is its atmosphere and its aesthetics. One of the things that people have said about the book is that it’s very similar to an Ernest Hemingway story, especially “” The Old Man and the Sea’’ with its man vs nature attitude except one is far more depression while the other is more hopeful. This man vs nature element can be a lot more interesting than a human bad guy and lead to an emotion-driven introspective experience, and the idea of the wolves constantly stalking them is a great chilling element. Seeing them within the shadows with their glowing eyes or just hearing them howl together in the background does provide a unique feeling of dread and fear that isn’t dramatic or any grand, but still distinctly unnerving. Despite how unrealistically they operate and factually wrong they are made to be like, the wolves honestly are the best part of the movie; they provide the only feeling of suspense, you actually feel some sense of hierarchy within their system when the people describe their pattern, and they prove to be better characters than the actual humans (the only character you feel bad for is the wolf that’s killed and gets decapitated by these stupid people). While there are some nice shots of some snowy mountains during the beginning and ending of the movie done by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, the rest of the film is just seeing harsh blizzards and a bunch of trees, which isn’t interesting to watch and just gets repetitive after a while

The Grey feels like a story that was meant to be something more important than a traditional survival flick and one that would have needed more updating in order for it to be more than just a mindless survival flick with no sense of character or realism. As a short story, its sounds much stronger and whether good or bad, seems to have a better understanding of its premise and elements as opposed to this flick. The story is hollow, it never feels like real life, the characters are bland unlikable idiots, the visuals get dull after a while, and despite the wolves being the only okay part of the movie, it doesn’t change the fact that they don’t act like real-wolfs and instead are written to be as hostile as possible for this idea to actually work. It pretends to be smarter and deeper than it really is and that results in a forgettable boring flick. Nothing to gnaw on with this flick, best to just leave it to freeze.