A group of heedless oil riggers are flying home from the drill site when their plane crashes in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, and within killing range of a wolf's den. Now led by the depressive ex-con who had been charged with securing the site from wolves, the group must now keep moving in a desperate bid to survive the foreboding wilderness and the attacking, ravenous creatures. Joe Carnahan's "The Grey" is an appropriately harsh look at survival in the wilderness but I question the use of the same gritty filming techniques used in his urban films ("Narc", "Smokin' Aces) to capture the essence of this story. The film also contains a standard and uninspired script, with an apparition gimmick which distracts from the story. Once more, and oddly to my way of thinking, being employed as an action star, Liam Neeson is adequate as the lead survivalist but it is getting to a point where these roles are becoming standard and he is not providing the dimensional performance he is capable of. The film does contain several rousing sequences as well, including an improbable one where a member of the group jumps from a cliff to a thicket of trees and secures a line by which for the others to scale. "The Grey" does succeed in providing the necessary thrills one expects from this kind of movie, but provides very little in the way of anything else.
