Carnahan’s Grey a Perplexing Existential Thriller
Somewhere deep in the wild wintery recesses of Alaska, a plane has crashed. Oil company sniper Ottway (Liam Neeson) has survived, if only barely, and out of a good fifty-plus passengers and crew only six other men can say the same. With no weapons other than a couple of knives, with barely any usable material left within the wreckage, with no way to call for help or any chance of rescue considering their remote locale, the group decide to trek into the forest hopefully heading towards some semblance of civilization and possible rescue.
Liam Neeson in The Grey © Open Road Films
But they are not alone. A pack of hungry wolves has already few on some of the dead, their taste for human flesh made even more aggressive considering the crash has taken place within their hunting grounds and near their den. They have Ottway’s and the rest of the group’s scent, and they will not stop until each and every one of them is deceased and the potential threat to the pack has been eliminated.
Joe Carnahan’s The Grey is easily the filmmaker’s most intriguing, unusual and risky effort by a long shot. Light years better than either The A-Team or Smokin’ Aces yet while not reaching the same plane of excellence as the director’s stupendous Narc, this movie is nonetheless a fascinating, not always successful existential survivalist thriller worthy of a cheer or two. Never quite going where you expect it to, following convention only to shatter it a few moments later, building to the type of ethereal, obtuse climax Stanley Kubrick, Jack London or Terrence Malick would be proud of, the movie is an incredible and bewildering mess, coming oh so close to glory yet never quite achieving it.
For those looking for some sort of comparisons to similar entries in the genre, I guess the best you could say is that Carnahan’s latest is like some sort of surreal, iconoclastic melding of Alive, The Edge and The Thin Red Line or The New World, the finished product an epic fever-dream of imagination and cliché with each battling for supremacy with neither coming out on top. While the surprises involving who lives and who dies (and in what order) is never much in doubt, the pulse and the pace of the tale is so unsettling, so unbalanced, that fact doesn’t mean as much as it probably should. There is energy, creativity and inspiration to spare here, Carnahan showing he’s got far more talent and inventiveness as a filmmaker than his previous two throwaway comic book-style action efforts would even slightly hint at.
At the same time, the director doesn’t always have a firm grasp of where it is he wants to go and what it is going to take to get there. Some of Ottway’s flashbacks to his wife’s loving embrace are oddly placed, while bit of dialogue between he and his companions can oftentimes end up on the stilted side. More, the wolves themselves are like some monstrous nightmare straight out of some B-grade horror movie, gigantic offshoots of the CGI creatures found in the Twilight films or in last year’s abomination Red Riding Hood. For the most part they never look or feel real, lessening the inherent power their all-too frequent attacks might have had otherwise.
But Neeson is incredible, dominating the film with an icy resolve that transcends the story and helps take things to a viscerally effective level they never would have ascended to without his aid. Right from the start you can’t take your eyes off of him, watching his every move so important it becomes nearly impossible to remember who the other men are or why they’re even important. Sure costars Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts and especially Frank Grillo have their moments, and certainly there are sequences where the entire cast work together in a sizzling symmetry that’s close to stunning, but in the end this is Neeson’s showcase pure and simple, and without him I doubt’ there’d be a heck of a lot to talk about.
I’ll be curious to find out how The Grey does with a ticket buying audience. When the movie works, it works like gangbusters, and there are numerous pieces to it I can’t stop thinking about and I saw the darn thing back during the last week of December. It is incredibly shot by Masanobu Takayanagi (Warrior) and dynamically scored by Marc Streitenfeld (Robin Hood), while the team of editors who assembled it all together into a cohesive package have simply outdone themselves. But the movie is familiar, and there are few, if any surprises, all of it building to a nebulous conclusion some will consider nothing more than a self-indulgent copout. Yet I like this movie, in many ways like it a lot, and even for all its faults Carnahan has delivered a January thriller I’d like to see again.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
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