Movie Review: "The Grey"

"The Grey": B-. The opening shot of "The Grey" scans the beautiful snow-covered mountains of Alaska, with hardy green pines being the only sign of life. We then meet John Ottway (Liam Neeson), a big rugged outdoorsman making his way into the raucous bar at a large oil company's camp. There are punches being thrown and loud cursing all around him, but Ottway is alone with his thoughts and his bottle at the bar. He narrates to us that these men who work the pipeline in the Alaskan outback are ex-cons, punks, trouble makers and assorted losers. Ottway seems too intelligent to be part of that scene, yet there he is. He is a sharp-shooter, hired by the company to pick off wolves and other animals who threaten the line workers. Accordingly, he is an expert on the habits of the northland's wild beasts. His mind wanders to a pretty woman who is lying in bed with him, telling him to be brave. That mental vision lasts only a few seconds. Abruptly he leaves the bar, contemplates suicide, but changes his mind and gets on the frigid company plane with thirty or forty other pipeline workers who are on their way to a job site in no man's land. Ottway does not want to join in the conversation. His vision of the woman comes back to him. Once again he's alone in his thoughts, just like he was at the bar.

The plane crashes in the mountains. Blood and guts are strewn across a large area. Ottway somehow survives the crash, along with only six other men. He comforts a dying man inside the plane, then reluctantly surmises that he alone among the survivors has the skills and the knowledge to give them a chance to remain alive while they hope against hope for rescue. Someone correctly predicts that their chances of being rescued are practically nil. If the searchers sent up forty planes, maybe they'd be spotted. But these men are nobodies, in their own eyes, so the search for them will more likely consist of only one or two planes.

Not everyone is keen on Ottway taking charge. After all, he wasn't elected. But it soon becomes apparent that they need a leader, and he is the most trusted. The men believe that their biggest challenges are avoiding starvation and freezing to death. There is one thing they overlooked, however: wolves. The group finds out the hard way when a wolfpack has one of the men for a late night snack. Good thing Ottway is a wolf expert. Can he lead the men to safety? Are they in the wolves' habitat, within a thirty mile radius of their den, or was the pack just passing through? They can't stay by the plane. There is too much blood in the snow, easily detected by the wolves. They head for the faraway trees, not knowing for sure if that is the direction they should be going.

Other than Ottway, we really do not learn much about the survivors. It took me awhile to remember their names. I identified them as the guy with the big glasses, the guy with the neck tattoo, the black guy, the guy with the swollen eye who prayed, etc. They were in many respects fungible characters, which was a weakness of the movie. It also seemed to me that the bitter cold was not dealt with realistically throughout the movie, only in sporadic scenes. In one scene a character is submerged in a river, yet his clothes come out of it without freezing. On the plus side, Neeson is perfectly cast. Rugged, intelligent, brave, believable. Toward the end of the movie we learn more about the woman in his dreams. Ottway had a lot on his mind besides his co-workers and the wolves.