When the movie, “The Grey,” ended and the lights came on in the theater, a sense of relief came over me. The previous two hours had been among the most harrowing I have experienced watching a movie, and it was good to be out of the cold and away from the wolves. I felt better knowing a ravenous creature born and bred in an unforgiving wilderness would not be bursting in from the edges of my vision to tear the meat from my bones, and in a final act of cruelty, leave a little bit of me uneaten to slowly bleed to death.
You might think I’m being dramatic. Then I invite you to see “The Grey.” It takes everything out of your pockets, drops you in the middle of an intense, unrelenting winter storm, and surrounds you with hungry wolves. There are no caves in which you can take shelter, no hunting cabin with a cache of supplies, and no backpack with energy bars - just an endless, frozen wilderness, an empty stomach and the knowledge that you probably won’t be able to travel far enough to be saved before the cold or the predators claim you.
“The Grey” stars Liam Neeson as Ottway, a man who has lost everything and finds himself working at an Alaskan oil-drilling rig near one of the fabled ends of the earth. The insides of his eyelids are a 24-hour theater of painful memories. When his eyes are open, you can feel the cold wind slicing through him, and when his eyes are closed, you can feel the gaping hole a woman he loved left behind. He goes out one night, drops to his knees, slowly puts the barrel of his gun in his mouth, and starts to pull the trigger. Then a poem his Irish father wrote comes to him:
Once more into the fray.
Into the last good fight I’ll ever know.
Live and die on this day.
Live and die on this day.
He releases the trigger. The next day, he and a couple dozen other men get on a plane they believe is going to take them home. Instead, it crashes and leaves enough of them alive to fill the stomachs of a few wolves. Writer and director Joe Carnahan (“A-Team”) shoots the crash sequence a few inches from Ottway’s face, which allows you to see terror appear in his eyes and the will to live spring to life in him. When Ottway regains consciousness in the middle of an icy plain, he immediately rallies the survivors.
That night, the wolves make themselves known in the first if many gripping scenes. Ottway thinks he sees a survivor moving and calling for help, but then a wolf pulls back from the corpse, blood dripping from its maw. Ottway and the other men run it off, but moments later, dozens of unblinking red eyes are staring back at them from the darkness.
Ottway decides the best course of action is to head to a distant tree line, where he believes they’ll have a fighting chance against the wolves. While he has a few tricks up his sleeves, the group will spend the next few days running across the landscape, desperately lighting fires to keep the wolves at bay, and getting gorily picked off one by one.
If you go into “The Grey” hoping to see an action movie or a rousing survival adventure, you’ll be disappointed. The theme of “The Grey” is not action or adventure, but how overwhelming circumstances bring a man who’s already died back to life to fight for every moment he can live.
“The Grey” is a triumph. Neeson delivers a career-defining performance as Ottway, Carnahan has created a deeply immersive cinematic experience, and the sound work is brilliant. I will not soon forget the scene at night during which the mournful cries of the wolves in the hills that surrounded the men changed upon the arrival of the alpha male, and how intently the men started into the darkness, and how loud the silence was as the snow fell and their fire faded.
Rated “R” for violence, disturbing content, bloody images and pervasive language. Three-and-a-half stars out of four. Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.