The Grey Review
Between this film and Where the Wild Things Are I'm getting really sick of having conflicting opinions about movies I know are basically good. Both are superbly well-made and obviously crafted from a very personal place on the part of their directors and yet I find in both of them a barrier to entry that lets me say that they're spectacular. In the case of The Grey, a survival action-thriller from writer/director Joe Carnahan, that barrier to the entryway of greatness is the entire second half of the film.
However, before diving in to that very dramatic statement let's look at the film's premise and its merits. Ottway (Liam Neeson) lives in an Alaskan oil refinery where he uses his considerable skills as a hunter to keep the workers safe from predators. When a plane he and several of the workers were on crashes in the middle of the frigid Canadian wilderness Ottway must keep the small group of survivors alive from not only the elements, but from a vicious pack of wolves who are pursuing them.
Down at a thematic level The Grey is all about finding the will to survive, finding something to keep you going when your instinct to live past the next second has failed you. Many of the survivors who travel with Ottway are often called upon to find a reason to keep on going, usually their family members. The defining moment of this theme for me was when a character loses all his will to move on; he has nothing to go back to except a life in the freezing cold with no friends or family, so why is he trying to get back to a life with nothing to offer him?
However, that's not the only underlying theme of the piece. It also seems to have an atheistic agenda, bringing up the question "If God is real then why is He so quiet in times of suffering?" and answers it with "Nowhere at all". At some point near the end of the film, Ottway starts calling out to God, demanding that He reveal Himself with some miracle. However, when he receives no response he decides to rely on only himself to survive. While this is a very well-acted and well-written scene it felt kind of out of nowhere to me when I watched it the first time. Even when I looked back on the film for buildup to this confrontation of sorts I thought it was poorly set up; there are only a few times when God is even addressed and even then only for a minute or two. While this is an interesting philosophical question to explore I think it could've been established and built up a lot better early on.
There's a lot to admire about The Grey on a technical level: the lighting and sound design really make you feel like you're in the middle of a freezing cold environment, the cinematography is self-controlled in its use of shaky cam which makes it all the more effective when the film uses it. Normally I would complain about the amount of close-up shots used in this film, especially on the actors' faces, but in this instance it feels justified; The Grey is pretty much all intensity all the time, so it would almost hurt the movie if intense close-ups weren't used frequently. As somebody who's currently employed at what you might call a working class job I really appreciated how the dialogue captured how these kinds of people talk; lots of cursing, bragging about how many one night stands they've scored, yapping about nothing, taking shots at one another. While the acting is good from the whole cast, this is definitely Neeson's movie; he throws himself into a fiery emotional performance that might be the best of his whole career. The one complaint I have in regards to the technical side of the film is that the CGI is often shoddy, especially on the wolves, which might've been the reason they're rarely clearly seen.
I like how all the characters act believably when the plane crashes in the woods: in shock, panicky and hopeless to the point where all they want to do is give up and die or just wait for help to arrive. I know that's how I'd react to having been through a plane crash and then being stranded in sub-zero temperatures.
If I were to tell you what I thought the biggest problem of the film was it would have to be the pacing; after a traditional first act of setting up the characters, initiating the call to action and giving them a goal The Grey loses all sense of structure. It just goes from one intense action set piece to the next and while this works for awhile, it eventually starts to get predictable, making it boring, and it starts to feel like a slog because you have no idea where you are in the movie. Excepting the factor of who in the party is still alive, you could take any of the actions scenes, switch them around with any of the others and it wouldn't make a difference in the film's pacing. (SPOILER) And then there's the ending, which much of the criticism against this movie has focused on. Even though I have my problems with the ending same as everybody else I think everybody else is hating it for the wrong reasons. Everybody hates the ending because it ended before they got the Liam Neeson vs wolf fight they were promised by the horrible marketing campaign. Even though I would've liked to see that too, "Taken with wolves" was never what the film was about, so it doesn't bother me that much. What bothers me is that it ends before giving us a climax; the film just ends right before what should've and could've been the biggest emotional gut punch of the film. Neeson has just gone through the wallets of the men he failed to save, realizing that he's left more than a dozen families husband and fatherless, he comes face to face with the Alpha Male of the pack that killed them, Neeson straps broken bottles and a knife to his hands and the theme of the film comes full circle as he finds his own reason for survival: revenge. Then it just cuts to black, leaving us unaware of that emotional final fight. I guess the point was that he found a reason to keep on going, but that didn't really feel like the emotional payoff that the scene needed. The film needed a climax and followthrough, emotional resolution for an audience who had gotten so involved in the story (and no, the post credits scene doesn't change anything. We need to actually see the emotional resolution for there to be any affect, not the aftermath).
The Grey reminds me a lot of Logan: an intense, emotional action-drama resting on the top-tier level of the gritty "guy movie" pantheon. While the ending unfortunately brings the whole thing down at least one letter grade and the pacing can get a bit boring in the second half the philosophical undercurrent, stellar performances and pro-level technical savvy on display from Carnahan make The Grey absolutely worth a watch, maybe even a second. If it sounds like something you'd like you'll probably enjoy yourself.
However, before diving in to that very dramatic statement let's look at the film's premise and its merits. Ottway (Liam Neeson) lives in an Alaskan oil refinery where he uses his considerable skills as a hunter to keep the workers safe from predators. When a plane he and several of the workers were on crashes in the middle of the frigid Canadian wilderness Ottway must keep the small group of survivors alive from not only the elements, but from a vicious pack of wolves who are pursuing them.
Down at a thematic level The Grey is all about finding the will to survive, finding something to keep you going when your instinct to live past the next second has failed you. Many of the survivors who travel with Ottway are often called upon to find a reason to keep on going, usually their family members. The defining moment of this theme for me was when a character loses all his will to move on; he has nothing to go back to except a life in the freezing cold with no friends or family, so why is he trying to get back to a life with nothing to offer him?
However, that's not the only underlying theme of the piece. It also seems to have an atheistic agenda, bringing up the question "If God is real then why is He so quiet in times of suffering?" and answers it with "Nowhere at all". At some point near the end of the film, Ottway starts calling out to God, demanding that He reveal Himself with some miracle. However, when he receives no response he decides to rely on only himself to survive. While this is a very well-acted and well-written scene it felt kind of out of nowhere to me when I watched it the first time. Even when I looked back on the film for buildup to this confrontation of sorts I thought it was poorly set up; there are only a few times when God is even addressed and even then only for a minute or two. While this is an interesting philosophical question to explore I think it could've been established and built up a lot better early on.
There's a lot to admire about The Grey on a technical level: the lighting and sound design really make you feel like you're in the middle of a freezing cold environment, the cinematography is self-controlled in its use of shaky cam which makes it all the more effective when the film uses it. Normally I would complain about the amount of close-up shots used in this film, especially on the actors' faces, but in this instance it feels justified; The Grey is pretty much all intensity all the time, so it would almost hurt the movie if intense close-ups weren't used frequently. As somebody who's currently employed at what you might call a working class job I really appreciated how the dialogue captured how these kinds of people talk; lots of cursing, bragging about how many one night stands they've scored, yapping about nothing, taking shots at one another. While the acting is good from the whole cast, this is definitely Neeson's movie; he throws himself into a fiery emotional performance that might be the best of his whole career. The one complaint I have in regards to the technical side of the film is that the CGI is often shoddy, especially on the wolves, which might've been the reason they're rarely clearly seen.
I like how all the characters act believably when the plane crashes in the woods: in shock, panicky and hopeless to the point where all they want to do is give up and die or just wait for help to arrive. I know that's how I'd react to having been through a plane crash and then being stranded in sub-zero temperatures.
If I were to tell you what I thought the biggest problem of the film was it would have to be the pacing; after a traditional first act of setting up the characters, initiating the call to action and giving them a goal The Grey loses all sense of structure. It just goes from one intense action set piece to the next and while this works for awhile, it eventually starts to get predictable, making it boring, and it starts to feel like a slog because you have no idea where you are in the movie. Excepting the factor of who in the party is still alive, you could take any of the actions scenes, switch them around with any of the others and it wouldn't make a difference in the film's pacing. (SPOILER) And then there's the ending, which much of the criticism against this movie has focused on. Even though I have my problems with the ending same as everybody else I think everybody else is hating it for the wrong reasons. Everybody hates the ending because it ended before they got the Liam Neeson vs wolf fight they were promised by the horrible marketing campaign. Even though I would've liked to see that too, "Taken with wolves" was never what the film was about, so it doesn't bother me that much. What bothers me is that it ends before giving us a climax; the film just ends right before what should've and could've been the biggest emotional gut punch of the film. Neeson has just gone through the wallets of the men he failed to save, realizing that he's left more than a dozen families husband and fatherless, he comes face to face with the Alpha Male of the pack that killed them, Neeson straps broken bottles and a knife to his hands and the theme of the film comes full circle as he finds his own reason for survival: revenge. Then it just cuts to black, leaving us unaware of that emotional final fight. I guess the point was that he found a reason to keep on going, but that didn't really feel like the emotional payoff that the scene needed. The film needed a climax and followthrough, emotional resolution for an audience who had gotten so involved in the story (and no, the post credits scene doesn't change anything. We need to actually see the emotional resolution for there to be any affect, not the aftermath).
The Grey reminds me a lot of Logan: an intense, emotional action-drama resting on the top-tier level of the gritty "guy movie" pantheon. While the ending unfortunately brings the whole thing down at least one letter grade and the pacing can get a bit boring in the second half the philosophical undercurrent, stellar performances and pro-level technical savvy on display from Carnahan make The Grey absolutely worth a watch, maybe even a second. If it sounds like something you'd like you'll probably enjoy yourself.
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