That Looks Chilly! A review of "The Grey"

"Rosebud"

Remember that movie where Jack Donaghy and Hannibal Lecter had to fight that bear?  No? Oh then you probably know them as their secret identities, Alec "double punch" Baldwin and Sir Anthony "Muthafucka"Hopkins.  That movie was the killer nature masterpiece, "The Edge."  Recently, a similar looking movie was just released starring Qui Gon Jin AKA Liam Neeson fighting wolves in the frozen Alaskan tundra or just Alaska, since "frozen" and "tundra" are just synonyms for "anything north of America". The movie was directed by Joe Carnahan, best known for "Smoking Aces" and the remake of "The A-Team" In the trailer we saw Liam Neeson strap a bunch of broken bottles and a knife to his fists.  Then we heard wolves growling. This was obviously going to be an amazing movie based on the fact that we were about to see the same man who trained Batman take on 50 wolves with his knifey, sharp glassy fists.

I couldn't have been more wrong.  The posters only showed Liam Neeson's angry and bruised face, which lead me to believe that this movie would be something along the lines of "Castaway" meets "The Edge" meets "The Tempest".  But happens instead? Hollywood strikes again.  It turns out that the movie miles away from my dream movie, "Castaway on the Edge during a Tempest." What we got instead was Liam Neeson playing John Ottway, a sniper for an oil drilling facility killing any wolves that attempted to bum rush and attack.  It implied that many wolves were stupid enough to try multiple times to attack the facility, which contradicts something later in the movie.  On his last day, he heads home via plane with all the other workers, but because this movie isn't called "Alaskan Flight 511 to Anchorage and Nothing Goes Wrong" the plane crashes killing everyone except Liam Neeson, 5 guys and a homeless looking Dermont Mullroney.  They discover that they actually crash landed into an area that unfortunately for them,  is where a pack of wolves have marked off as their hunting area. Fortunately for the wolves, this is super convinient for them because they love eating humans.  As far the cast, the best part is the fact that none of these guys are distinguishable from the next other than the size and color of their beards. Plus a lot of them didn't seem all that interesting to the plot, therefore when the wolves starting picking them off, I started rooting for the wolves. The wolves in this movie didn't attack at once, but rather chose to systematically pick everyone off slowly because this was going to be a 2 hour movie.  Because we were already 20 minutes into the movie, Neeson becomes default hero because his face was on the movie poster. He has to lead the remaining survivors away from the crash and into the tundra to a forrest, clearly forgetting that wolves are faster and possibly more vicious then humans.  My favorite moment is as they were leaving the crash site, one member wanted someone to say a prayer or something for all the dead oil drilling workers. "They were all good men...Or whatever.." one said, I think. Not at any point do they acknowledge the flight attendants or pilots who horribly died or almost died, then got devoured by wolves.  Apparently we needed to see more of the snow and Alaskan wilderness, which had more personality then the remaining cast.

We are also subjected to really quick and abrupt flashbacks throughout the movie of what appears to be Neeson's characters' wife, then we are jerked back to reality. It was like Carnahan watched "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and thought it would be good to add.  It was a really poor choice executed lazily. It really felt that this was an artsy attempt to give substance to Neeson's character. The whole time during the movie I was wondering who he was. At least with his other movies we get to see that hes a former cop/assassin/ninja/jedi knight. If anything we see he happens to have an extensive knowledge of wilderness and sniper training.  We get a taste of awesome marksmanship skills early on, but then for some reason, we never see it again. Well golly, thanks there. In the first part of the movie we see him take out a wolf with a sniper rifle at a oil drilling facility. I think we got that part.  I just wanted to know more.  His performance is full of the usual Neeson bona fide baddassery, sprinkled with his gravelly and Irish pipes. His acting dial at times was perpetually stuck on "reluctant hero with hints of sage wisdom" but he does his darnedest to bring this character to life. The other men are just crude archetypes of typical male characters, who aren't even given the common courtesy of any development, other than a few stories about their pasts and the last person they boned, which is clearly a regret that all men feel when they are faced with death and the unknown.  Yes, they bond, only after presenting themselves as a bunch of insecure and one-dimensional wolf kibble. Then again, with all the bonding and story telling, I was surprised that the wolves didn't get tired of waiting around. They were stupid enough to run into sniper fire earlier in the movie, but not smart or hungry enough to just partake in their frozen food buffet.
There is a good deal of philosophical material throughout the movie, dealing with faith, family and making a stand. A lot of the time, it felt shoe-horned in, like someone piggybacking on a decent joke. I felt it was a really lousy and lazy attempt to give the story some bigger meaning. Newsflash. There didn't have to be one.  I can only imagine the director felt that 2 hours of Neeson and 5 guys fighting off wolves just by itself wasn't going to appeal to audiences, therefore he needed to fix something that wasn't broken.  The director tries to take the survialist genre and tried to add little tones of mortality, faith and other unnecessary themes that ended up hurting the potential this simple action movie.  Adding an artsy feel to a movie is not a bad thing. Just make it a different movie. However, taking away from Neeson's wolf-punching and stabbing extravaganza with half-baked attempts to give the story substance is a greater crime than trying to give a great movie a sequel. I bet if they made this movie with Howie Long or Mario Van Peebles, all that heavy-handed underlying thematic fodder would not even be considered.  In fact, I would've been happy with those two guys teaming up to fight bears AND wolves and call it "The Grey Edge 2: Blizzards of Fury and Wild Animal Fighting."

I guess I expeced this movie to be different, but I guess that is my flaw as the average movie goer.  I see a poster and a trailer promising one thing, but then get something completely different.  In conclusion, the movie let me down in the story and character department, which is not surprising these days in Hollywood, especially if you've gone to the movies in the last 5 years, or let alone been alive for the last 5 years. The setting and the idea for an awesome human vs. nature battle was already there, but the powers that be went in completely different direction, significantly hurting the potential masterpiece of one Liam "Where's My Lightsaber" Neeson. If making all my movie decisions based vague posters and strategically cut trailers is wrong, I don't want to be right.