A group of plane-crash survivors (led by Liam Neeson, center) battles the Alaskan cold and killer wolves in this tense, testosterone-filled thriller.
Forsaken in a cruel wilderness, a man looks to God and pleads for help. Receiving no answer, he says, “F- -k, I’ll do it myself.”
There isn’t quite enough of that kind of flinty dialogue in the survival thriller “The Grey,” but the level of manly bravado is more than sufficient. Director Joe Carnahan, the hyperactive force behind “Smokin’ Aces,” this time slows things down, to highly pleasing effect. As Liam Neeson’s loner and a group of fellow survivors of a plane crash try to outwit the wolves stalking them, there are moments of stern beauty and quiet devastation.
Neeson begins the movie narrating a compelling prologue that turns out to be a letter to the woman who left him. For some reason he’s stuck working for an oil company in Alaska, together with “ex-cons, fugitives, drifters. Men unfit for mankind.” Spoken like a man who’s taken a walk through the newsroom of any tabloid. He takes his rifle out to shoot wolves, and for a moment puts the business end in his mouth.
After an airborne misadventure with some fellow roughnecks, he tells the others what he knows about wolves in the midst: a lot. It turns out his job with the oil company is to put bullets in canis lupus wherever he lurks.
The middle of the movie sags when the story turns into a routine but serviceable variation on “Ten Little Indians” or “The Poseidon Adventure.” Insufficiently developed characters get bloodily removed from the action one by one. In between encounters with wolves, too much screen time is wasted on dull quarrels and routine chatter about whether there is an afterlife.
Still, there is some sparkle to the writing. When the men feast on roasted wolf, one of them says, “I’m more of a cat person.” And Carnahan keeps delivering beautifully crafted scenes. The initial meeting with the toothy predators works superbly, as the director gradually reveals seven sets of gleaming eyes raking the darkness like tiny headlights. There is an exquisite tenderness to a couple of death scenes, too, thanks to a sense that life truly matters that is utterly absent from most adventure films. “Who do you love?” Neeson’s character asks a man who is breathing his last. Neeson — this linebacker priest — is the perfect choice to play such a soulful rifleman, and the way images from the men’s dreams interplay with the grim reality closing in on them is affecting.
“The Grey” arm wrestles rather than tackles the harsh riddles of manly existence that were so memorably anatomized in its fellow subzero odysseys “The Edge” and “Runaway Train,” and like those films it may be too conventional for the art-house crowd, yet too arty for the megaplex. I prefer to call it an unusually reflective blood-and-guts saga.