Starring: Liam Neeson
Runtime: 115 minutes
Rated R for violence/disturbing content including bloody images, and for pervasive language
Directed by Joe Carnahan

Despite some fairly good reviews, my hopes weren’t very high for “The Grey”, an action/adventure survival film starring everyone’s favorite bad*ss, Liam Neeson. Don’t get me wrong, Neeson is a really good actor and the movie didn’t look like it’d be too bad, but the director at its helm, Joe Carnahan, hasn’t exactly had a phenomenal track record. He made the supposedly pretty good “Narc”, which I haven’t seen, but he followed that up with “Smokin’ Aces” and the A-Team reboot, which were both absolutely awful. “Smokin’ Aces” was one of the few movies I’ve seen that wasn’t just a bad film, but it just made me really mad that I paid five bucks for it and wasted 2 hours of my life sitting through it.

Luckily, “The Grey” changed my mind about Carnahan, and in my mind establishes him as a filmmaker to watch. This is an exceptionally tense and well-made film that manages to be memorable to an extent that most films never reach due to excellent character development and some truly haunting sequences.

The film is about several workers at an oil refinery at the northernmost tip of Alaska and a man named John Ottway (Liam Neeson) who works to protect the workers from dangerous native animals, such as Alaskan wolves. On a plane ride south to take the workers home, there is a horrific crash and only a handful of people, including Ottway, manage to survive. This plane crash sequence is truly incredible, especially considering the film’s relatively low budget of 30 million dollars. It’s a white-knuckler, to be sure.

Ottway manages to organize the surviving passengers and gather enough supplies to (hopefully) make it back to civilization before the incredibly cold weather or wild Alaskan wolves kill them all. Thus begins an entirely riveting adventure/survival film that becomes much more than that with its surprisingly thoughtful thematic content.

I could tell right off the bat that something about this film was a little different than the average action/adventure/survival movie. The cinematography is gorgeous, and not only wonderfully establishes the environments but also helps to convey the fear, isolation and eventual exhaustion of the characters. The camerawork is accompanied by a haunting and beautifully fitting score.

The best part of the movie, however, is the genuine filmmaking talent behind it. There are several scenes in this film that hit far harder than you would expect from a film like this, both through some surprisingly graphic violence and genuine emotional attachment to the characters, who, as you may guess, do not all survive. There is a scene early on in which Ottway is talking to and calming a man who is mortally injured and about to die. There isn’t any rapid cutting during the dialogue or overly intrusive music. There is simply Ottway and the dying man, who is panicked at first and then more serene through Ottway’s description of what the man’s death will be like. Ottway doesn’t scare the man with the news, but rather asks him who he loves, and for the man to let that person take him. Something fifteen minutes into a film shouldn’t be as effective as that, but this film pulls it off.

I don’t really want to talk about anything later on in the movie for fear of spoiling some of the outstanding scenes in the movie, so I’ll use the rest of the review to concede that despite the film’s excellence, there are several flaws to be had. The most glaring isn’t really the movie’s fault, but rather a product of its design. This isn’t an easy film to sit through at times, and the lack of subplots and unnecessary comic relief can make the film feel overwhelmingly tense and bleak to the point of being somewhat exhausting, but I can’t really hold great filmmaking against the film itself. The biggest legitimate problems have to do with Carnahan’s inexperience in scaring his audience. There are a few too many jump-out-at-you-with-a-loud-noise scares as well as maybe one too many scenes of wolves doing very violent things to characters we like, but none of these problems really sabotage the overall film. Most people I’ve talked to about the film strongly dislike the ending, and while I can see why, I don’t know how it could’ve ended any better than it does. It is somewhat anticlimactic, yes, but it definitely makes the film much more interesting as a whole and highlights the philosophical themes scattered throughout it.

In the end, despite the filmmaker’s spotty history, “The Grey” is definitely one to see in the theaters, and a film that you won’t soon forget.

***1/2(out of four)