Miraculously surviving a plane crash may just prove to be Ottway's death sentence. He must brace himself for the sub-Arctic cold, assuming he can fend off the first night's hypothermia. Then he has to deal with the remaining survivors -- fellow ex-cons and undesirables, employed to protect an oil company's refinery. But if the humans don't tear each other to shreds then there are the carnivorous, bloodthirsty wolves, tempted by the smell of fresh carcass, and of course, the thrill of live meat.
While this catastrophic crash may be what sets director Joe Carnahan's narrative in motion, the usually over-indulgent, bombastic filmmaker (Smokin' Aces, The A-Team) has pared back his aesthetic gimmicks in The Grey. Despite a marketing team adamantly trying to convince the public otherwise, this man versus the wild yarn is short on superfluous action and gore; instead, it is a traditional B-movie deftly told and contemplative in its craftsmanship.
Cast adrift in the opening minutes, Ottway buries himself amid the powdered arctic by day, protecting pipeline workers from the aggressive wildlife. Yet when off-duty, he finds himself among other similarly employed ex cons. He is a wandering shell of a man, overtaken by melancholy. He appears doomed. Such exposition is carefully handled in a hallucinatory monologue set to poetic verse -- a letter he is writing to his dearly departed wife. It is all eerily autobiographical, conjuring up Neeson's own personal tragedy (the untimely death of his spouse, Natasha Richardson). And perhaps it makes the viewer all the more open to Neeson's on screen trauma.
Managing a tall philosophical order, The Grey works because it sticks to the genre's narrative conventions while depicting the harsh reality of the physical world. Carnahan spares us from quick-edit obscenity, allowing Ottway and a team filled out by expert supporting players -- Dallas Roberts, Frank Grillo, Joe Anderson, and Dermot Mulroney -- to shed their alpha male reticence quickly after the plane's wreckage has settled. Grim but never cynical, The Grey elicits the sensorial by focusing on its human subjects. For the first time since his debut Narc, Carnahan shows restraint, relying on performance rather than a pair of digital, editing room scissors. He composes moments of grisly beauty.
After the film's crash, Ottway and company tend to a bleeding compatriot (James Badge Dale) who has punctured a vital organ. He lies in repose frightened, pleading, and in need of a consoling hand. Carnahan lingers on the death. As the wound gushes blood, some men watch in terror; others mitigate the pain; another laughs in confounding hysteria. But each of these hardened men succumbs to the circumstance's otherworldliness. It's honest, ugly, visceral, and for these stoics, an encounter with their destiny that will in all likelihood occur sooner rather than later.
In this vast expanse of hopelessness, The Grey is a rare mainstream action picture, exploratory in genre and of whatever lies beyond. Ultimately ten minutes too long and concluding a bit too tidy for the questions it poses, The Grey, however, does dare to show not merely the human imperative to survive under the most primal conditions; but it abides by an honor code of human dignity, separating us from the amoral beasts that prey.
