At some point after Schindler’s List, Liam Neeson decided to go straight up action, full blast, man. Full friggin’ blast! So here we are, The Grey, as in the grey wolf. This is dark, ominous, borderline horror-style action.
A bunch of dudes get in a plane crash in the Alaskan outback and seven of them survive only to be hunted by a pack of wolves. Seven mostly tough guys, who are lead somewhat by a depressed, suicidal, clear-thinking Liam Neeson.
I don’t like horror movies at all, but I can get behind this stuff. It reminded me of that Anthony Hopkins movie about the bear. Man vs nature on a couple of fronts, the elements and the animals.
In the end, it wasn’t that great. Some sappy stories around the camp fire and a few dramatic death scenes and some long, sad goodbyes were all followed by a rousing climax in the form of an epic fight against the alpha male by Neeson’s character in the wolf’s den.
You can predict all this.
** PLOT KILLERS FOLLOW **
But it really wasn’t an epic fight. It was an epic fight prep scene, then a black screen, then the credits. The scene where he’s strapping the bottles to fingers is on every preview. That’s the last scene in the movie. The last scene!
Taping broken bottles on fingers… black screen… credits.
So he dies, I assume, reciting a poem his father wrote, with the words “once more into the fray” on his lips. Sure, the back story is good and there’s a lot of tension, but it’s just an average movie.