The Grey | Review

If an earnest but unseasoned film school student were to reconceive Peter Weir’s deeply felt, artfully crafted ‘The Way Back,’ it might resemble something like The Grey, writer-director Joe Carnahan’s (‘Narc’) latest B-movie. Resembling an action genre re-dux of ‘Alive,’ but without the complex allegory or spiritual underpinnings, the movie stars Liam Neeson as a lone-wolf wolf expert employed with “ex-cons, drifters, and assholes” on an Alaskan oil rig. Then: a plane crash, the inhospitable tundra, a mismatched collection of surly survivors who prove to be surprisingly in touch with their feelings, ravenous spectral wolves … Men’s men will test their mettle, but who will survive?

The movie tries uncomfortably hard to push the lost-wife parallels between Neeson himself (recent widower of Natasha Richardson) and the character he plays, a veteran security guard haunted by his wife’s tragic death. In surer hands, this might have been a raw conflation of actor and role, though the script’s persistently generic take on loss resists Neeson’s naturally compelling gravitas. The movie would have been better off sticking to unadorned survivalism; the panic of intimate family rupture is more keenly present and palpable in both ‘Taken’ and ‘Unknown,’ two of Neeson’s other recent B-movie excursions, both of which are flawed but consistently engaging.

Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography is nicely grained and ashen, though the use of CGI graphics in depicting the antagonist wolves seriously defuses the impact of their threat, as well as the ambition to portray them as borderline supernatural. Obvious resorting to green screens also diminishes what might have been the movie’s defining set piece, a ‘Cliffhanger’-esque crossing of a ravine on a flimsy tether.

There’s an inner strain of surrender running through the movie that confounds the usual action movie survival-at-any-cost attitudes. At least one character simply gives up, without a clear physical necessity to do so; he’s not even given the opportunity to resist the hero’s rousing call-to-battle speech — and as such be conveniently labeled a coward in the audience’s eye. While this peculiar and unsettling acquiescence of the will flouts received ideas of heroic masculinity, it also feels unnaturally imposed on the story — an idea rather than a behavior.

Despite the fact that he’s taken corrupt paycheck jobs like ‘The A-Team,’ Carnahan shows in ‘The Grey’ that he’s managed to preserve an unblemished spot or two of cinematic innocence. The movie’s naked ingenuousness stands at odds with expectations of brash action-movie bravado. Carnahan’s emotionally vulnerable men are transparently boys in grown-ups’ clothing, to the point where some scenes, including a perfunctory campfire group confessional, could be right at home in a coming-of-age movie like ‘Stand By Me,’ except with middle-aged actors cast in the credulous boys’ roles.

Carnahan’s movie innocence threatens to fall into manipulative self-consciousness, such as when he resorts to predictable, fitting-the-backstory-together flashbacks to rouse audience sentiment. The device is as out of place here as it was in Danny Boyle’s ‘127 Hours,’ which is probably where Carnahan crimped it from. This magpie instinct sometimes crosses the threshold into blatant theft, as with one death scene that is snatched wholesale from Paul Newman’s excellent ‘Sometimes a Great Notion’ (1970) — except without any of Newman’s patience, creeping fatalistic dread, or empathy. It’s a rushed, Cliff’s Notes-version of the memorable, aching scene from Newman’s film, and emphasizes that as well-meaning as Carnahan may be, he has yet to distinguish himself as a unique, personal filmmaker.

Rating 2.5 stars