Review: The Grey Is Neeson’s Best In Years
- Jan 6, 2018
- 2 min read
A tale of life and death, of survival and of the nature of man, set in a frozen wasteland as a pack of hungry wolves hunt down our heroes. There’s more here than it first appears.
John Ottway (Liam Neeson), along with a number of other oil workers, including Diaz (Frank Grillo), Todd (Joe Anderson), Jackson (Nonso Anozie) and Luke (James Badge Dale), stranded in the Alaskan wilderness following a catastrophic plane crash. Following protocol to stay with the wreck until help arrives, they soon find that this won’t work for long. The local pack of wolves, brought out by the many corpses, soon begin to hunt the survivors. Thus they are given a choice. Fight and die, or run, and maybe live.
Some movies make you feel things. The Grey makes me feel cold. That is too say, watching the movie gives me the feeling that the 30° weather outside is closer to freezing. From ice on beards to the almost constant wind, it’s a cold, bleak movie filled with cold, bleak men. And it’s damn great. Whether it’s the almost constant feeling of oppression as the hungry pack closes in one Neeson and his team, the finality and inevitability of almost every action or the genuine conversations between the participants. It feels real, like few other films do.
Neeson is, expectedly, excellent, as is everyone else. The movie breaks down the idea of the “tough guy” as it brings its characters face to face with something tougher than they are. Wolves, heights, cold weather, everything is out to get them, and none of it is holding back. As a film it flips between horror and survival with surprising ease, leaving very little to bog it down. Even the moments of levity, of which there are few, are undercut by the knowledge that things aren’t over yet.
The Grey is easily one of my all time favourites, as a horror, as a thriller and as a survival film. It pulls no punches and spares no unneeded content. It’s as lean and mean as it’s canine antagonists, and it’s a hell of a movie.
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