The odd phenomenon of Liam Neeson as an action franchise star doesn’t quite make sense, but it is undeniably fun to watch. He assailed his victims with both brawn and brogue in 2008’s Taken, and continues this rampage in his latest flick, The Grey. Directed by Joe Carnahan (The A-Team), The Grey is a survival thriller that builds steadily before ultimately falling flat, proving there are limits to the novelty of Neeson as a bona fide ass kicker.
Neeson stars as Ottway, a hearty Irishman who travels from town to town in Alaska challenging wolves to bar fights. Just kidding: an oil company pays him to shoot wolves Sarah Palin-style, keeping their drilling crews safe. One snowy night, the melancholy Ottway boards a company charter flight to Anchorage, and the plane predictably crashes in the middle of nowhere.
Seven men survive the crash. It immediately becomes clear that Ottway is the alpha male, and a man named Díaz (Frank Grillo) is the omega, the embittered outcast of the group. The rest of the “pack” is so utterly disposable that their names do not come into play. Over the next few days, a pack of monstrous CGI wolves begins to methodically pick off the survivors in grisly fashion (wolves, we are told, are the only animals that kill for revenge). Luckily, Ottway has a “very particular set of skills,” which mostly involves punching wolves in the face.
At this point the audience is expecting an entertaining, man-versus-wild showdown. But for all the improvised wolf-maiming devices the men brandish, we only see one Neeson-on-wolf fight in the whole two hours. Things that happen more than once, however, include clichéd dream sequences of Ottway’s wife, and recitations of a poem his father plagiarized loosely from Henry V. All this serves as a background to various characters questioning their faith and wrestling philosophically with whether to cling to life or succumb to the vast wilderness. If you read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” circa 8th grade, this should all be review.
Carnahan’s action scenes are short and predictable, and the talky second hour of the movie bores an audience primed for a fight. If the goal of this film was to deliver an emotional rather than an action-driven payoff for the audience, then it should have spent time making us care about the characters, rather than arming them for a wolf versus man battle that we never get to see.
