Testosterone rage

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Liam Neesons worries are for real as he battles to survive, and escape from, a nasty pack of wolves in The Grey

The Grey

Liam Neeson stars as the leader of a stranded pack of oil-rig roughnecks who are fighting for survival after their plane crashes in the wilderness.

Late is better than never with The Grey, a man’s-man of a genre flick that will satisfy the action audience while reminding more discerning viewers what they saw in director Joe Carnahan’s decade-old breakthrough, Narc.

However Neeson’s admirers feel about the disappearance of Kinsey-grade fare from his filmography, the film may be the best of his lowbrow outings, casting him convincingly as a broken man getting one last chance to prove his mettle.

Neeson plays a sharpshooter among brutes, hired to kill wolves that threaten the oil-company employees – “men unfit for mankind” he calls them in a nicely mood-setting voiceover – populating a remote Alaskan outpost.

On the verge of suicide himself, Neeson must rally when a transport plane crashes, leaving him stranded with half a dozen other men somewhere in the wilderness.

Scenes of post-crash triage deftly establish him as a man of deeper resources than his peers: as he coaches a dying man through his final moments, speaking with calm authority, Neeson and the filmmakers ground the film – promising that none of the deaths to come will be treated lightly, however pulp-flavoured the script’s perils may be.

Testosterone rages among the survivors, particularly from a violence-prone ex-con (Frank Grillo), but the film makes that energy serve the story instead of behaving (à la Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces) as if macho posturing were the whole point.

Skirmishes over what to do intensify once it’s clear that a nasty pack of wolves is pursuing the men, killing them territorially instead of for food, and Neeson argues they must leave the plane to seek shelter above the treeline.

Some viewers will find the movie’s slog through snow and pines longer than necessary, but Carnahan and co-screenwriter Ian Mackenzie Jeffers make the most of the time, wringing as much meaning as they can out of every test of courage and campfire bull session.

Expected man-versus-wild, man-versus-absent-God themes ring more true than usual here, though not at the expense of the promised scares: plenty of chase scenes and gory encounters keep tension high.

Co-stars Dermot Mulroney and Dallas Robert fill out supporting roles ably, lending character-actor colour to the ensemble without threatening the pack’s alpha.

Occasional grace notes (particularly with regard to sound editing) exhibit a subtlety unexpected from a filmmaker who just gave us The A-Team, and even the tale’s final stand-off, while pandering to the more hotheaded members of the audience, manages to squeeze off one last shot of adrenalin without insulting more sceptical viewers. – Hollywood Reporter