There, Wolf

I am not a fan of Liam Neeson’s recent rebranding as action hero. In Schindler’s List, Michael Collins, Kinsey and other films, he demonstrated that he is an actor of superior ability. In Taken and Unknown, as well as in Joe Carnahan’s The A-Team, Neeson plays one-note characters capable of great physical feats but little else. To be sure, the physically imposing Neeson is very good at being physical (kicking, punching, torturing) but I miss the more dramatic Neeson. This is why his latest film, the existential adventure The Grey (also directed by Carnahan), is a return to form for the actor, where character is privileged over image. This is the action driven Neeson I can believe in.

Ottway (Neeson) is an Irishman working for an oil company in northern Alaska. His job is simple and brutish: to keep the wolves away from on-site company employees by shooting them. Ottway’s voice over narration, which disappears from the film after its opening, explains that he is a deeply troubled individual. Within the early minutes of the film, we see Ottway put a gun in his mouth (he doesn’t pull the trigger, of course). Soon, he is on an airplane for a brief respite from the cold, if not the detachment the job requires. But then the plane goes down in the white hell of Alaska, and the wolves smell blood. The Grey details the survivors’ attempts to outsmart the wolves and remain alive long enough to be rescued.

When I referred to the film as an existential adventure, I used the term in the broadest possible sense to indicate that the characters’ ordeal force them to reflect on life and to take account of their worth (or lack thereof). The film is somewhat clumsy in its early attempts to add some psychological weight to the characters, but as their numbers inevitably dwindle, the survivors become much more than the stereotypes and clichés they at first appear to be.

The Grey is a man vs nature film depicting nature at is uncaring worst (not that I needed to be convinced). In one of my favourite documentaries, the riveting Grizzly Man, director Werner Herzog observes how any notion of harmony between humankind and nature is an illusion. Nature will destroy us. Indeed, the ice plains and ominous forests in The Grey serve as plateaus of death at nearly every turn, and it is here that Ottway and some others make their stand. 

The Grey is an unexpectedly sombre experience, so much so that none other than Roger Ebert himself could not watch another film shortly after having seen this one. To be deliberately vague, the film remains coldly and calculatingly committed to its thesis.