The Grey

The Grey – If you see enough movies, your fate is to compare pictures now playing with older, better films in the past. By the criteria of 112 years of film history, very few pictures showing in the multiplex have much significance. Of course, this is to be expected. It’s best, I think, to enjoy most films for what they are: modest diversions. The problem is that Hollywood doesn’t produce that many films, and the movies that it makes are enormously expensive, and so every movie has to be touted as the best and greatest. This creates an aura of enhanced expectations that, in reality, very few films could meet. Joe Carnahan’s The Grey is a man in the wilderness epic that suffers badly by comparison with Lee Tamahori’s The Edge (1997) The latter film starred Anthony Hopkins, featured a huge and ferocious bear, and had a suitably laconic, and ursine, script by David Mamet. The Grey stars Liam Neeson, whom one wag says has “punched everything else so not why not punch a wolf,” a pack of CGI-generated lupine predators, and a script that teeters on the edge of pretentiousness while remaining, more or less, silly and implausible. In truth, the film is grim procession of casualties, a bunch of death scenes involving scruffy oil-pipeline workers who die in various gruesome and spectacular ways. The recent multiplex feature that the film most resembles is Santum (2011)t, the almost unbearably hopeless cave-diving picture that was likewise a tour of an ER trauma ward a thousand feet underground. The characters are not well-defined but it doesn’t matter they’re all wolf-fodder anyhow. Neeson is grimly efficient but seems to be an idiot. The plot of the movie makes no sense: the men desert their crashed plane and, generally, behave suicidally – conduct that includes a ridiculously dangerous descent of an obviously matte-painted cliff. (I like matte effects and the cliff is great – it’s like something from a silent movie.) Most disappointing are the wolves. Real wolves, of course, are rather namby-pamby critters that look like gawky German Shepherds, but they are endearing. The wolves in this film look like the werewolf from American Werewolf in London, huge black beasts slavering over their prey with glowing green eyes – they look to be about the size of a rhinoceros. This is a bad movie if you’re a wolf, highly anti-Lupus, and will, lamentably, probably result in many people thinking wolves are so dangerous that they ought to be exterminated. I think that it is true that no one has ever documented a wolf attack on human beings anywhere in North America. Since the wolves are completely unconvincing and fictional, you hope that they are figments of the characters imagination – and, indeed, the film plays better as a science fiction movie with the wolves playing the part of malign and murderous aliens. Carnahan can’t figure out how to stage his wolf-attack scenes and so he uses typical fast-cutting to obscure the action – this makes the movie unimpressive as an adventure story. Some of the scenes near the end of the film are confidently staged in long takes and quite impressive but… by that time it’s too late to save the picture.