By Julian Carrington

DIRECTED BY JOE CARNAHAN

Though it stars the professional badass that is Liam Neeson, post-Taken, Joe Carnahan’s The Grey isn’t the breathless B movie that its trailers suggest. It is, instead, a surprisingly contemplative follow-up to the director’s The A-Team, concerned less with Neeson’s very particular set of wolf-punching skills than with timeless philosophical posers like what it means to persevere in the face of God’s indifference. Carnahan turns a classic survivalist scenario—about seven Alaskan oil workers, stranded in the wilderness following a plane crash—into an overtly existential thriller, and certainly can’t be faulted for a lack of thematic ambition. He can be blamed, however, for a screenplay that strains under his attempted fusion of high- and lowbrow elements, and for surrounding his star with an all-too-expendable supporting ensemble.

Neeson, at least, upholds his end of the bargain, and supplies The Grey’s one notable performance as a sharpshooter recruited to protect pipeline contractors from hostile arctic fauna. The film’s opening scenes are decidedly sombre, as Neeson laments his lost wife (an unhappy true-life parallel), before wrapping his lips around the barrel of his rifle. He subsequently pulls himself together, and boards his employer’s Anchorage-bound charter, which literally proceeds to fall apart. True to Neeson’s recent reinvention as an unassailable force of nature, he emerges from the wreck unscathed, and becomes the de facto leader of a band of dazed survivors, who in turn become fodder for some alarmingly territorial wolves.

Carnahan cites Jaws as a major influence, and his plot recalls that film’s references to the U.S.S. Indianapolis, and to the terrible fates of those aboard, picked off one-by-one when the ship went down in the shark-infested Pacific. Carnahan also cribs from Spielberg’s sparing use of Jaws‘ animatronic antagonist, initially shrouding The Grey‘s ultra-predatory lupines in shadow, and implying their presence via choruses of chilling howls.

Alas, where human drama is concerned, comparisons to Jaws become considerably less charitable; the macho posturing and crude philosophizing of Carnahan’s nondescript cast pale next to the fraught camaraderie shared by the Orca‘s iconic crew. If Neeson, perhaps, is worthy of Scheider, Shaw, and Dreyfuss, his stock fellow survivors certainly aren’t, nor is their undercooked fireside soul-searching. As such, by The Grey‘s third act—with the engrossing early crash sequence a distant memory—the beleaguered troupe must brave not only God’s indifference, but the audience’s as well.