The Grey

The will to survive. Everyone worries if they have it or not and hopes they never have to find out. Sometimes life has different plans. On board a small plane an oil-drilling team crash-lands somewhere in the middle of Alaska. The seven survivors struggle to survive while a pack of wolves, who sees them as intruders, hunts them.

Opening with a bang, The Grey, grabs hold right away. Sprawling scenery, captivating characters, and "sweaty-palm" scenes keep the story moving. Unfortunately, just as the story begins to peak, the momentum comes to a screeching halt and crawls to the finish line. Everything leading up to the halt is exciting and great fun to watch. Being a pretty straight-forward plot the character conflict had to be high.

Seven men, led by Ottway (Liam Neeson, "Unknown"), must band together to survive this pack of wolves. Ottway becomes the leader and is the most knowledgable. Liam Neeson gives a believable performance and creates an onscreen character with courage and strength. Though all the men are important the most notable other is Diaz (Frank Grillo, "Warrior"). Too proud to admit his fear, Diaz provides much character conflict and even brings some humor along. He and Neeson work very well together and make the conflict look genuine. Who knows? Maybe it really was!

An interesting way to show what the characters used to stay tethered to their survival was the use of flashbacks or anecdotes: different for each of the men. The one flashback that continually appears throughout is Ottway's. No explanation is given, but it seemed that whenever he closed his eyes he would lose himself in that reality and have to be yanked out of it by his predicament. It came up in places where it didn't make sense sometimes and really detracted from the story.

Overall, The Grey is a worthy first-month-of-2012 movie, and will keep audiences enthralled in the coming weeks.

6.5/10