The Grey

The movie seems to promise quite a bit, but never really delivers.

It seems the movie makers weren't quite sure what type of movie they wanted to make, and ended up making something that is neither here nor there.  Liam Neeson stars as a sniper hired to kill wolves and other dangerous animals in an oil  field in Alaska.  His character starts off ready to off himself, because he no longer feels he has anything to add to the world.  This is a good starting point to develop his character, but he seems to do a 180 almost instantly without any explanation when the plane they are on crashes in the wilderness. There's really no development here that suggests he would immediately want to do this. He just does it.

Then the movie grows grim and grey as the title suggest killing off characters one by one without giving us the time to actually get to know them, and expects us to be sorry they died.

Nothing really happens with the story they started to tell, it just sort off vanishes off into thin air, all the while keeping Neeson's character in the same exact moral spot he was at the beginning. Even the character tries to fight it, but the story just doesn't let him escape his pre-planned doom. Which by the second act is painfully clear where this is headed.

At the end everybody dies. And Neeson realizes it has all been in vain. Yes 2 hours of the viewers life wasted, because there was no point to this movie.

Of course this is all an issue with the story line, but there's more in this movie to cringe about. The survival of these workers is hampered not only by the atrocious weather, which doesn't seem to affect them more than just making it difficult to move, the frostbite, the pneumonia, etc... that can be caused by this weather are never addressed, except for a throwaway scene with one of the survivors coughing up blood; there also a pack of CGI wolves which is systematically hunting them.  The wolves  which are massive, almost bear sized, rather than large dog sized seem to think that attacking these humans is a good idea. The movie makes it a point that they aren't eating them, so why do the wolves seem to be intent on killing them, if they haven't even so much as approached them. It just seems to be a device to artificially add suspense to the movie.

Then there are the plot holes. The survivors gather what they can from the wreckage, and try to make it to some trees in the distance to escape the wolves.  Eventually reaching a chasm they need to cross. They do that by making one of them leap off the edge of the mountain and land on a nearby pine tree and tie a rope around it so the others may cross. Once at the bottom, they find the wolves there too. So where did they come from, are these now rappelling wolves? Flying wolves than can just get down a 100 foot chasm that seemed to pose a near impossible vertical climb to the men, but the wolves can happily find a way down faster?

At the end only Neeson is left alive, cursing at god, for not doing anything to save him, and he realizes he just walked in to the wolves den, and is about to get mauled alive. Then the movie ends.

If this was supposed to be a movie about hopelessness, an pointless antics, it succeeds, but what throws it off is the fact they were establishing something totally different at the beginning.  Personally this movie could have been about survival, and about a man's journey from despair to hope, but ultimately its just as gray as its title.

Unless you like to spend 2 hours with characters that just die in awkward circumstances, and are ravaged by horrible CGi wolves this movie is very skippable.

2.5 out 5