'The Grey'

“The Grey”

By Bob Garver

I’ve spent the last few weeks com­plain­ing about the lame release slate in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary. These months are regarded as a dump­ing ground for weak new movies that would never sur­vive in a busier movie sea­son like sum­mer or the hol­i­days. That said, I did think we might be in for a rare bright spot in “They Grey”. It’s an ugly movie about wilder­ness sur­vival, and I fig­ured a movie like that is a tough sell at any time of year. It may as well come out in Jan­u­ary where the star power of Liam Nee­son can let win a week­end where peo­ple are des­per­ate for any­thing halfway decent. I thought that maybe it was a good movie that was sim­ply short on mar­ket­ing poten­tial. Alas, my opti­mistic the­ory proved fruit­less. “The Grey” is both unap­peal­ing and uncompelling.

Nee­son stars as a mopey wolf expert for an oil com­pany in Alaska. His job is to shoot any wolves that are mak­ing a bee­line for the work­ers. After a last-minute deci­sion not to com­mit sui­cide, he joins the oth­ers on a plane headed back to wher­ever they call home. The plane goes down. Now Nee­son and a small group of fel­low sur­vivors are stranded in the mid­dle of nowhere and the nearby wolves feel threat­ened by their “inva­sion”. With only crude spears for arma­ment, the group tries to make it to safety with full knowl­edge that they them­selves are being hunted.

The wolves are fear­some ene­mies, but it’s hard to take the “man vs. nature” theme seri­ously when they behave like typ­i­cal hor­ror movie slash­ers. That is to say that they strike only when the plot decides that we haven’t seen a wolf attack for a while, and it’s always dur­ing an oth­er­wise quiet scene so the movie can give us a cheap scare. On the upside, I don’t have to ques­tion their motives for attack­ing like I did with the were­wolves from “Under­world” last week. “Scared and hun­gry” is a sim­ple expla­na­tion, but a suf­fi­cient one when the char­ac­ters aren’t sup­posed to be super-intelligent.

As for the humans, their story isn’t ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing. Nee­son is good for a halfway decent per­for­mance as always (the best scene of the movie is one where he talks a fatally-wounded pas­sen­ger through his final moments), but his fel­low sur­vivors are way short on per­son­al­ity. It’s hard to see them as any­thing more than inevitable vic­tims. One ele­ment I found inter­est­ing but depress­ing is that there’s very lit­tle talk of get­ting res­cued or going back to their lives. It’s as if they’re all stay­ing alive for the sake of stay­ing alive. The film tries to be deep about it, ask­ing us to pon­der issues such as life and its pur­pose. My sim­ple answer is that nobody wants to end up as a frozen corpse or wolf food.

“The Grey” is at least a com­pe­tent film, which is more than I can say about many of the films released in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary. But it is by nature an unpleas­ant film, the kind that only works if it’s extra­or­di­nar­ily well done and com­pels you to brave its sub­ject mat­ter. It instead has a mod­er­ate qual­ity that is a notch above every­thing else that’s been released recently, but by itself isn’t ter­ri­bly entertaining.

There is still hope of get­ting some good movies this sea­son. The Acad­emy Award nom­i­na­tions were announced this past week and both “The Artist” and “The Descen­dants” did very well. They should be get­ting wide releases soon and then you can treat your­self to two of 2011’s most excep­tional films.

Two Stars out of Five.

“The Grey is rated R for violence/disturbing con­tent includ­ing bloody images, and for per­va­sive lan­guage. Its run­ning time is 117 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at HYPERLINK “mailto:rrg251@nyu.edu” rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Jan 31 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.