Yahoo Lifestyle Movie Review: The Grey
THRILLER; MA, 1hr 57min
STARRING: Liam Neeson, Dermot Mulroney, James Badge Dale, Frank Grillo, Joe Anderson, Nonso Anozie Dallas Roberts
Wintry chiller The Grey opens in shades of, with a panning shot of the forbidding wooded Alaskan mountains where an oil-drilling team is based. Neeson is the image of desolation as Ottway, inconsolable over a lost love. And far worse is to follow when a horrific plane crash leaves a handful of surviving workers stranded in blizzard-swept snow. If the diabolical cold doesn’t kill them, the lurking wolves surely will, for this is their territory and they don’t take kindly to interlopers.
Ottway, who was hired as a sniper to fend off the creatures and so has a sense of their feral psyches, becomes the ad hoc leader of the frightened men. Their plight is shocking, the animatronic wolves more monstrous than any otherworldly demon, and director (and co-writer) Joe Carnahan—he also worked with Neeson on The A-Team—spares them not one second. They’re up for it: the actors make a strong ensemble with the nexus of Neeson’s performance seemingly wrenched from a deeply lonely place. But in the white-knuckle dynamic of holding on, who these men are is of less significance than the lengths to which they’re driven in a hell’s-own landscape of unendurable beauty.
Andiee's Rating: ****
