First of all, I need you people to check the fresh new banner. It has Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. Seriously, kudos to Zac. This banner is amazing. Guess I’ll have to write more movie reviews now.
So maybe you’ve seen the the preview for The Grey. If not, here it is. Take the time to watch it, because it is crucial to understanding my feelings about this movie:
Here’s what this trailer tells me: The Grey is a movie that has some stupid lost-love setup, then consists of an awesome plane crash followed by Liam Neeson punching the fuck out of some wolves. This? This is a movie I want to see. First, Liam Neeson being a conscienceless badass and killing things is a formula that works for me. Taken was a fucking incredible movie with next to no plot that never bored me for a second and had me giggling gleefully through most of its length. Also, the idea of a movie where wolves get punched is really appealing. I have already sung the praises of punching horses in movies. Punching wolves is like punching horses on hard mode. I could probably be happy with 95 minutes of just watching people punch wolves, with the occasional wolf murdering someone. That’s the movie I was pretty sure I was going to see.
I was so wrong.
Fair warning, this review is going to involve some spoilers. If you don’t like spoilers, just skip down to the last paragraph. I’ll wait for you there. Don’t fucking whine to me if you read through and it spoils the movie for you.
Honestly, it’s really hard for me to quantify The Grey. Yes, it does have a lot of wolves murdering people, and a good amount of fairly awesome and ridiculous survivalist plot as well. And nobody plays the stoic badass as well as Liam Neeson does. But it also has a healthy portion of stuff that I was not prepared for: it actually tries very hard to make you care about the characters – such as they are – and honestly does a halfway decent job of that.
First, the plot: Neeson works for an oil company, paid to kill wolves to keep them away from the grunts working on the pipeline, or the derricks, or whatever the hell it is that they’re doing up there. The movie is kinda vague about that. He’s writing a letter to a woman that we presume to be his wife, telling her how he misses her since she left him. Then he goes outside and puts his rifle in his mouth, but stops just short of actually blowing his own head off when a wolf wanders by and he has to kill it instead. The next day he’s on a flight to somewhere – Anchorage, maybe? – that goes down over the Alaskan tundra. Seven men survive and set up camp in the wreckage of the plane. But then wolves attack, which could be seen as a bit of karmic recompense really. Neeson, who has been studying wolves in order to better know his enemy, theorizes that they are near the wolves’ den, which is why they are so aggressive. The men set off on a trek to get as far as possible from the crash site, hoping to run into civilization along the way. But the wolves give chase and one by one the men are taken out, by wolf attack, sickness or just good old accident.
What this movie does unquestionably brilliantly is suspense. Had it been more of a horror movie I would have rated it among the best of recent years. What director Joe Carnahan has a clear handle on is tension. By forty-five minutes into the movie, the audience is trained to tense up every time it gets quiet or someone stops walking. I like this. I like when a movie makes me feel nervous and anxious, and takes advantage of the antagonists in such a brilliant way. These are not people who are avenging some slight or have made a pact with the devil; these are animals that are protecting their home and they will not stop trying to kill you. The suspense is taut and thrilling, and enough to overlook the fairly shitty CGI wolves and some pretty amazing leaps of logic. (Example: in one particularly awesome scene, the party comes up to a cliff that they must scale down. It’s made abundantly clear that the wolves are closing in behind them and getting down the cliff is their only way to safety. After a delightfully ridiculous scene, one of the men ends up falling to the ground on the other side of the chasm, only to be devoured by wolves. Oh fuck, the wolves can teleport!)
The other half of the movie, though, is a bit more of a puzzle for me. Carnahan devotes a good amount of time building up a character and a backstory for Ottway, Neeson’s character. He’s lost this woman who meant a lot to him – as I said, presumably his wife, though they never really spell it out specifically. He has mysterious motives for removing to the great frozen north and is initially reticent to talk about his past. As the film goes on and things become steadily more hopeless he slowly opens up, talking about his drunken Irish father and being confronted about his near suicide. The intent of all of this is clear: we are meant to empathize with Ottway and actually care whether he gets out alive or not. The problem is, a lot of it is very overwrought and tries far too hard to force some sympathy. When the big reveal about the wife comes it’s stirring, but it’s hard to invest emotionally in the backstory when the story that’s happening right now is so compelling. There are two different movies going on here, and they fight against each other instead of working together, each seeming to interrupt and draw focus from the other in a way that’s not conducive to a single, coherent film.
There’s also some backstory given to the other characters, though it’s painfully obvious that they’re nothing more than cannon fodder and their stories are the kind that you’ll find in any horror movie or war story about a group of relative strangers trying to get back home: the bitchy ex-wife, the girlfriend he needs to get back to, the little sister who died when he was a child. It’s all pretty standard stuff. There is, however, one particular story that leads to possibly the greatest moment of the movie, though probably not for the reasons Carnahan wants.
MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD: Dermot Mulroney’s character Talget talks about his little girl, how he’s the only one allowed to cut her hair. Sometimes in the morning he wakes up with her standing over him, tickling his face with her hair and saying “Wake up, daddy!” When Talget tries to cross the chasm mentioned earlier, the rope breaks and he crashes into a tree with a sickening sound that actually made me groan in the theater, then drops through the branches to the ground. We see him laying on his back, broken and bloodied. Then suddenly a little girl appears above him, ticking his face with her hair and saying “Wake up, daddy!” He smiles. Then the camera pans back, and reveals that it’s actually the wolves eating his face. Guys, you should know by now that this caused gales of hysterical laughter in me. The combination of shameless emotional grab and face-eating was, to me, the most delightful thing that could possibly have happened.
There is one plot device on the sympathy side that works really well, though. Ottway decides to collect the wallets from everyone who died in the crash to bring them home for the families. Throughout the film, whenever someone dies their wallet is recovered and added to the pile. It’s a little like dog tags in a World War II film, and it actually did more to humanize the casualties than their cursory backstories ever did: we care about them because Ottway cares.
FINAL GIANT SPOILER: And this one’s a doozy, so seriously, if you want to see the movie skip this paragraph. Nothing infuriates me more than giving away the last shot of a movie in the trailer. But The Grey takes this a step further, not only giving away the last shot but using it to set an expectation that the film itself never lives up to. In the trailer we see Neeson with broken airplane liquor bottles taped to his hand like brass knuckles, gearing up to attack. This is why we think we’re going to see a movie about punching wolves. Guys, this is literally the last shot of the movie. After sitting through nearly two hours of waiting for some man-on-wolf combat, we don’t even get to see the fucking wolf get punched. I count this as the most heinous kind of betrayal and mismarketing.
In all, I’m very split about this movie. It’s not a bad movie at all, and in fact parts of it are extremely good. But the marketing has set every potential audience member up for a fall by misrepresenting what kind of experience they’re going to have. Put The Grey on the list with Drive: movies that advertise themselves as being action fests, but are actually extremely slow, contemplative films. Dear Hollywood: if you think nobody will come see your movie if you tell us what it’s really about, why fucking make it in the first place?
Great review. Neeson is out-standing here and gives probably one of his best performances that we have seen from him in a very long time. The rest of the film also works because there’s not only this certain paranoia going on but even when the “action” comes, it’s tense, brutal, and surprising. Best film of the year so far even though that’s definitely not saying much. Check out my review when you get the chance.
SPOILER ALERT: Okay, so you didn’t see a wolf get punched. Was it not enough to see them beaten and jabbed with sticks, cooked and eaten and decapitated? Dude, you are demanding.
MORE SPOILERS: I give this movie a lot of credit for not killing off the black guy first, but there are definitely some questionable plot points, namely: a) wouldn’t someone who plunged into that river die pretty quickly from hypothermia? b) how does Ottway’s letter to his wife, which got smudged by a few drops of snow melting off a fellow passenger, survive the plane crash, the wolf attacks, etc, and still be intact at the end of the movie? c) how does Mr. I-Know-All-About-Wolves stray so far from the river and end up walking DIRECTLY INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE FREAKING DEN?
Also, I kind of hoped Ottway’s wife had left him–really left him–because of his bad social skills, or his fear of intimacy, or whatever. BECAUSE HE WAS A LONE WOLF. Wouldn’t that have made a better story?
Still, for all its flaws, the scenery was spectacular, the wolves were frightening, and the movie has continued to disturb me long after I left the theater. Every time I turn out the lights, I half expect to see all those eyes glowing all around me.