Fashionado

The Grey is a unique movie experience:  what you expect is not what you get.   Great stories always have a basic human emotion at their core.  Death is inevitable for everyone.  For an audience, this is a powerful emotion and no matter who you are or where you come from death will get you.  The only choice we have is how we face it and more importantly how we live leading up to the final moment.

Director Carnahan (The A-Team and Smoking Aces) has experience with action pictures.  His past efforts have been unquestionably juvenile. With The Grey, he has graduated to a more mature level of film making.   It would have been very easy to simply make a film about men stranded in the wilderness.  The emotional depth of the characters and  their reactions to facing death is what sets this film apart.

 

Oscar nominee Liam Neeson (Schindler’s List and The A-Team) is the very definition of a movie star.  He has had much success in the last few years.  His huge box office hit Taken will get a sequel later this year.  We find Neeson’s character at the opening of the film contemplating suicide.  He works in  a remote part of Alaska, and it is  his job is to protect oil workers from the wolves that stalk them.  At the end of the working season, everyone boards a plane to return home.  There is a violent crash which leaves only a handful of survivors.  The men find themselves stranded and hunted by a pack of  wolves defending their territory.

The violence is graphic and horrifying.  There is a carnal fear of being attacked by a large animal.  To this day, I do not step in the ocean without hearing the theme song to Jaws in my head.  Each man in the film has his own individual response to the moment of their death.  Some fight, some try to run, and some give up willingly.  I will not give away the ending, but I will say that it is a controversial choice.  If you appreciate the theme of the movie the ending is perfect.  Neeson is spectacular and shows yet again that he is one tough dude.  There is no gray area when it comes to this film.

fashionadofilm score 7 out of 10