Once More Into the Fray with The Grey

Right off the bat I will say that the marketing for this flick will convince you that you are seeing another movie. A movie in which the Liam Neeson from Takenspends a couple of hours giving a bunch of wolves broken bottle enhanced knuckle sandwiches. The previews lie.

Instead what you'll get is a chilling fight for survival by a struggling group of plane crash survivors in the freezing Alaska wilderness. What this movie does is put a handful of hard edged characters in an impossible situation and asks them how hard are they willing to fight to live.

The group of characters don't always come across as likable, but they mostly come off as real. You are given enough to know about the characters to make you care about their fate. As you would expect, Liam Neeson does a fantastic job as the leader of the group, Ottway.

The movie does a great job at doing what these kinds of movies should do, putting you in that situation and having you wonder how you would react. We are dealing with a group of people who slowly come to realize that they are probably about to die and as the audience we can't help but think if we were in such extreme conditions, would we be willing to try to fight through it?

Director Joe Carnahan uses the wolves and the elements fantastically, giving us a really good idea of what these people are going through. You can almost feel the chill of the blizzard through the movie screen. What he's also adept at is ratcheting up the suspense. One of the most suspenseful sequences I think I'll see in any movie this year deals with a treacherous climb via rope over a deep ravine. Carnaharn let's you off easy for the first couple of trips for the characters over. He waits until its the turn of the guy most nervous about that trip, then he once again takes us hand over hand over that ravine and its truly effective terrifying stuff.

The best thing I can really say about the movie is that after giving you enough chills and thrills to keep your heart rate up for the running time is that the images and the questions it asks linger with you days after the credits start rolling.