It's an indication of how strange Hollywood's plan for its minions' is, that, when read on paper or seen in a trailer, Joe Carnaghan's The Grey has all the makings of a Rambo-esque Alpha adrenaline fuelled adventure, with newly installed cinema badass grandpa Liam Neeson fighting a pack of wolves hand to hand in the harsh wilderness.
Once a highly promising director of hard boiled, emotionally charged drama thrillers, Carnaghan post-Smokin Aces and The A Team has the reputation for being one of film's experts in over the top entertainment, while Neeson's recent mutation from highly revered leading man into action hero is one of the most unlikely since Bruce Willis permanently waved goodbye to his comedy roots with Die Hard in 1989.
This sets up to a survival horror/thriller of disappointingly familiar nature, albeit played straight.
Ottaway (Neeson) is a security contractor for an oil company in rural Alaska, paid to protect the drillers from occasional wolf attacks through the scope of his sniper rifle. Beset by personal demons and suicidal urges following his wife's exit from his life, Ottaway's meaningless existence is thrown into sharp focus when he and a group of other employees are left stranded when their civilisation-bound plane crashes in the desolate snowfields of the frontier state.
The small knot of survivors (played by Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts, Joe Anderson, Nonso Anozie and Ben Bray) are marooned in blizzard like conditions, wounded and surrounded by their dead colleagues. Initially intent to hole up and wait for rescue, their plans are quickly discarded when they discover they have fallen into the hunting grounds of a wolf pack, the lethal creatures making their presence known immediately. With the threat of artic conditions on one side, and being torn apart by nature's hunters on the other, Ottaway rallies the team and begins to lead them out of their nightmare, but not before there numbers begin to dwindle, pushing each and every man to his extreme limit, outcomes varying in gruesome, haunting manner.
All the hallmarks of a standard, Stallone-esque blockbuster are here on show. We have the grizzled loner with all the know-how and experience to combat the threat and to serve as the natural leader type. The group contain a couple of egregious trope codifiers as far as survivor characters go, with the most obvious being Frank Grillo's asshole cynic and Joe Anderson's buttmonkey slacker. There are the big bads of mother nature, even including the big boss mentioned by name with a sense of dread, then finally revealed in the climax. However, while The Grey cannot be said to be original in its set up, it is superbly observed in the manner it completely deconstructs and refocusses the vital components of the genre.
This is where Carnaghan and Neeson take the chance to get back on track, or more likely simply deliver a poignant call back to their initial, more objectively valuable work. Showing the tone and style of his finest work, Narc, Carnaghan here tones down his visual flair to suitably grimy effect, while also using the spine of the story to bring to the screen a film that is both a touching character study and a deeply sorrowful, emotionally resonant redemption tale.
While all about him goes to hell, Ottoway slowly adapts to his nightmare circumstance, using his personal trauma as the fuel to keep walking, and keep protecting his scared, witless flock. The demons that almost destroyed him are given physical manifestation by the merciless wolves, used in the film with a touch of dramatic license to both heighten the thrills and better emphasise The Grey's core there: finding meaning to one's internal struggle, giving it a name and fighting back, discovering the inner fire required to take battle and preserve one's own life.
At the start of the film, Ottoway is all set to kill himself, having come to the conclusion that his exitstence is meaningless, irredeemably empty and void. Ironically, he is stopped by a wolf's call, and in the disaster that follows uses the memory of his wife, once a weight on his weary shoulders, as a beckoning call to continue his journey. By film's end, he is willing to use everything at his disposal to keep going, to at least try to fight his way out.
It is a powerhouse performance, multi-faceted, and one that dwarfs his back catalogue post-Schindler's List and makes a mockery of the disposable trash such as Taken and Unknown that had seemingly painted him into a niche corner. One scene in particular, in which Ottoway screams at God to intervene, to finally make his presence known and give him something, anything, to make going forward the decisive action, is both brilliantly apt and wonderfuly moving. By this point, his burden is so ferocious he questions what is worth his own actions.
The other characters, though side pieces in the common goal, are played with distinction by a cast of mostly obscure actors. Each player has distinct characteristics, decidedly human traits that, while not fully fleshed out, gives them individuality which dicatates their words, if not their unpredictable fates. Frank Grillo's Diaz, in particular, is superbly developed as a subplot, starting off as a cliche and then growing, his final scene both harrowing and affecting, the good in him coming out just as the light burns out.
The wolves, centre piece they provide, are deliberately exagerrated in both appearance and behaviour but don't come off as the villains of the piece, but merely as a representation of true peril. They act as they do, innate and not chosen, lethal and dangerous but ultimately just by their own nature, not by evil. When one character, in a pique of bloodthirsty rage, saws off the head of one of the animals for a trophy, it is a mostly empty gesture, an unneccesary surrender to regretable savagery. It is a glowing testament to the The Grey's message that the monsters of the piece are not the bad guys.
By bringing such opaque depth, much of it in saddening retrospect, Carnaghan here has accomplished brilliant work. While misled viewers may find themselves questioning an often slow and baleful piece, ultimately depressing, they fail to see the uplifting nature and journey at its core, one that transcends the survival thriller genre and uses it as a means to and end to tell a far more memorable, haunting story. In the darkest, deepest recesses of our world and in his own dark cloud laden life, John Ottoway finally finds a reason to once more go into the fray, to soldier on. For anyone who has ever questioned their existence, doubted themselves to continue, it is a profound, almost overwhelmingly positive message. Somewhere in our core, we can find the will to go on, even if because there is nothing else for it.
Sad, moving and highly thoughtful, The Grey is both a crowning achievemant for Joe Carnaghan, and a touching stage piece for Liam Neeson. A film rather than a movie, it easily surpasses the standard of common such fare in pursuit of something more meaningful, and finds it in the stark cold corner of our world, one beset by danger, but also self discovery and, ultimately, redemption. This is what the Grey is truly about.
Once more into the fray,
The last good fight I'll ever know,
To live and die on this day,
To live and die on this day...
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