Movie review: The Grey

by John P. Meyer

• Tweet
• Email
• Print
• 0 Comments

Welcome to Wolf Hell.

When it comes to lonely, thankless jobs, Ottway (Liam Neeson) has one of the loneliest and most thankless.

With a high-powered rifle slung over his shoulder, Ottway patrols the frozen north slope asscrack of creation, protecting oil field workers from marauding wild animals — wolves and bears, mostly. Seems some creatures just don't take kindly to having their pristine wilderness homeland blighted by energy-hungry industrialists. (The nerve of those guys!)

Ottway is the Beowulf-like protagonist of Joe Carnahan's visceral, austere, spectacularly photographed survival thriller The Grey, a movie whose chief narrative difficulty stems from its central premise: that a pack of wolves will go out of their way to hunt down and kill a group of hapless humans inadvertently dumped into their midst.

If you're neither a Boy Scout nor a lifelong outdoors enthusiast, you might not be particularly bothered by this seemingly inexplicable behavior on the part of the typically human-averse Canis lupus. For those who are, I recommend treating the entire film story as an allegory, with the wolves standing in for the unavoidable presence of the Grim Reaper in everyone's life. This will help the far-fetched maneating wolf narrative go down easier.

Such conceptual gymnastics prove worth the effort, because The Grey delivers in terms of chills, thrills, general spookiness, and (to a somewhat lesser extent) character development among men in extremis.

The relentless pursuit of men by "wolves" (substitute the metaphorical universal bugaboo of your choice) through a "vast snowy wilderness" (i.e., life) begins when a plane full of oil field roughnecks and their under-appreciated outsider-y guardian, Ottway, crashes en route to somewhere much warmer and more civilized. The motley crew of survivors (originally — if briefly — numbering eight) must find a way to pull together as a team and slog through the snow across harsh mountainous terrain towards some semblance of civilization.

(It should go without saying that they fail in attempts to establish cell phone coverage or otherwise radio the outside world about their desperate circumstances.)

Their journey towards kith and kin quickly becomes a race against time, the elements, and — most emphatically — an effort to outrun and outmaneuver the pack of vicious killer canines on their trail.

What develops is a sort of Ten Little Indians drama in which the survivors are picked off one after another by the ever-pursuing pack of big, bad, opportunistic wolves, who hover on the fringes of the campfire growling and howling ominously, their demon eyes glinting in the fireglow.

The survivors' various physical strengths and character flaws also figure into the equation of who lives (longest) and who dies (earliest). Ottway's seemingly obvious leadership role (he is, after all, a man of the outdoors and a hunter of wolves) is questioned most vigorously by a rather confrontational and boastful character (read: "stiff prick") named Diaz (Frank Grillo). There's a particularly dramatic moment when Diaz finally braces Ottway, knife in hand, across the campfire. It's a faceoff of bluster and tough talk against cold competence, and marks a turning point in the character-based narrative.

A recurring backstory finds Ottway hearkening back to good times spent with his loving wife (played in flashback, dream-like interludes by Anne Openshaw). She left him at some point, which has plunged him into the remorseful, taciturn, and ultimately ­­­­fatalistic state in which we now find him. Ottway has become a man unfit for the company of men, and perhaps finds himself more at home in his present dog-eat-dog (and wolf-eat-man) circumstances.

The Grey was filmed in the honest-to-God wilds of British Columbia, where the icy mountain fastnesses are genuine as genuine as can be — which renders the proceedings a chilling sense of reality that no amount of green screen digitizing could emulate.

The onscreen wolves fare less favorably, constituting a rough amalgam of real animals, animatronics, and digital effects. Once again, it's probably best just to think of them as metaphors.

Tweet