My friends introduced The Grey to me thusly: it’s Liam Neeson punching wolves in the face with brass knuckles for two hours.  Fucking sold!  Well, much to my dismay, some parts of that description were true -- Liam Neeson and wolves -- but the other parts were not.  

Despite a glaring absence of Neeson continuously plowing his fists into the pitiable faces of defenseless animals, however, the film managed to be decent enough.  The title suits it aptly -- it was bleak-toned and unrelenting, full of dreary dialogue and miserable action; however, some flaws kept the film from rising to anything more than mediocre. 

The Grey, directed by Joe Carnahan (The A-Team), pits Ottway (Liam Neeson, Unknown, Batman Begins, everything else) and fellow survivors of a plane crash in the Alaskan frozen wilderness against a pack of bloodthirsty, vengeful wolves.  They attempt survival in a camp surrounding the wreckage before moving into the woods some ways away.  All the while, they’re stalked by the pack.  Dallas Roberts (3:10 to Yuma), Frank Grillo (Warrior), Joe Anderson (Across the Universe) and several million other men co-star as members of Ottway’s ill-fated group.

The beginning plane crash and subsequent half hour was exciting and well done, and quite reminiscent of the pilot episode of Lost.  (I swear I’m not trying to bring Lost up in all my reviews; it just happens.) Ottway wakes up some 50 yards from the destroyed plane, and makes his way over to discover the horrors of the crash and assist the survivors.  Around the wreckage, they make camp, debate on what to do with the corpses and assess the threat of the unseen monsters lurking in the shadows beyond the light of the fire.  Then, some guy gets eaten by a wolf and they have to run to the woods for cover. 

This is where the movie falls into a formula and drags, gets redundant and falls into a predictably dismal narrative.  For the final 2/3 of the film, I sat waiting for the next person to get mauled.  And that’s pretty much how it panned out.  It resembles any other slasher or monster film, where you wait for each hot teen to get picked off one by one.  Except the hot teens are replaced with hideous, hideous men. 

Raising it just past your run-of-the-mill horror/thriller are the likeable, if undeveloped characters.  You’re not screaming at the screen, telling them what they should have done, you’re saying, “Well I guess there was nothing else to do there.”  (Except during the cliff-jumping scene, which I’ll discuss in a moment.) These are just a group of men stuck in a horrible situation beyond their control.  Another redeeming factor of the film, which kind of ties into the nature-really-fucks-people-over theme, is the way the wolves attack the men -- attacking in a pack when the men are out in the open, on the run, at their most vulnerable, much like I’m guessing wolves do in the wild.  I’m not a wolf expert, and I’m far to lazy to look it up, so I’m guessing that’s how they hunt.  The film doesn’t give the characters a break, and it shouldn’t.  I enjoyed that unrelenting realism.

For all its predictable narrative and outcome, the film actually had a few unexpected and welcome moments.  Those weren’t the moments when people were mauled by wolves mid-sentence, which happened 90 percent of the time.  Instead, they revolved around the characters dealing with their bleak situation.  One involves Ottway comforting a dying man in the direct aftermath of the plane crash.  He blatantly tells the guy he’s going to die.  The raw drama and melancholy of that scene was unmatched throughout the film.  But it really struck a chord in the film’s first act.

As for the characters themselves, Neeson is excellent, as usual, and the movie shined when they focused on Ottway.  He truly and utterly makes the movie.

When the film tried to add complexity to the other characters, it never really succeeded.  In fact, I there was an inadvertently humorous moment when one of the characters believed, on his death bed, that his daughter was hanging over him, sweeping her hair across his face.  Only in reality, wolves were devouring his face.  Although, I do find myself giggling in enjoyment more so than your average person every time I see a human get mauled and eaten alive by a beast, so it may just be me.  Generally, it’s Neeson you’re rooting for.  The other characters are just wolf chow.  Or river chow.  Or exposure chow.  Or fall-from-a-massive-height-into-a-tree chow.  Whatever chooses to consume them.

The most inane part of the film, which irked me enough to drop it a grade, came from that latter death -- the big jump to the trees from a ridiculously high precipice.  It was during a flight to freedom, which turned out to be a flight to just being mangled by wolves again.  I won’t get too much into details of the scene (that human most likely can’t jump 50 feet laterally while running through ankle-deep snow, that cotton clothes tied together by hand probably won’t securely hold a full-grown man free-falling from 100 feet, that the wolves somehow managed to find a way down the cliffs anyway, meaning the humans probably could have just followed whatever path the ostensibly less intelligent animals found) -- or maybe I will detail it a little.  But, at a time when the narrative was already tired, that scene drew me out of the film.

The film is decent enough and the ambiguous ending was well done for my taste.  It has its ups and downs and some glaring flaws I refused to overlook, but it’s worth watching for a mindless, dreary, though oddly inspiring -- thanks largely to Liam Neeson -- visit to the movies.  Indeed, much like the runt wolves will weaken the pack, the faults of the film at times lessen its value.  However, those faults got a good punch in the face by a brass knuckles-wielding, charismatic Liam Neeson, our hero.

Things I failed to weave into the review:

• “Fuck it. I’ll do it myself.” – Liam. Fucking. Neeson. Defying God.
• Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m nearly positive there are no glass alcohol nips.  Especially nips that are served on planes.  This is extremely relevant to the film’s conclusion.
• The scene where our boy, Diaz, lays on the log, dying, staring at the beautiful mountain scenery, finally muttering, “I’m not afraid,” was probably the best shot of the whole film.