The Grey (2012) review

(8/10)

I didn't expect this to amount to much, but wow, was I wrong.

PLOT:Ottway (Liam Neeson) is a depressed, Irish man working on a petroleum rig with tons of other hardened men. He had lost his wife and his father in the past. One day he and some of his working companions board a plane headed to a job, but the plane intensely crashes in the middle of a frozen nowhere. Now he and the seven survivors must trek across the wasteland until they reach trees and civilization, but they're being tracked down and picked off by a pack of ravenous wolves. Who will live and who will die? It's a very good plot idea that's executed quite well; I might even say better than I expected.

ACTING:The acting is pretty good if I might say so. Neeson did an excellent job though he stayed hardened most of the film. Other shiners go to Frank Grillo as John Diaz, Dermot Mulroney as Talgot, and Joe Anderson as Flannery.

SCORE:The score is nothing really new, but it's pretty good.

EFFECTS:There are more blood effects than I expected to see as well as an intense plane crash. The plane crash was pretty great, but it wasn't the best ever. It made you feel the intensity and freefall of the crash. The blood effects are pretty standard, but more realistic as opposed to most creature features and thrillers these days.

OTHER CONTENT:This movie surprised me. It was not just a wild, survivor thriller with soulless characters, it was a wild, survivor thriller executed with cinematic magic a handful of soulful characters. The character development did have some flaws, though, for some of the victims die before we get to hear any bit of backstory. Neeson's backstory has the most detail, and it is shocking. The cinematic magic of cutaways, flashbacks, and psychological visions are used more than once in here and they make the movie a sure-fire treat for film buffs. It's not anything truly spectacular, but it's worth a watch for everybody. The only things that bring this movie down besides character problems are shaky cam in important action scenes and predictability. Shaky cam appers so much in important action scenes that the audience can't tell where the wolves may have attacked or what happened to the people. The movie can be pretty predictable at times, too, which brings it down. The scare factor of this movie is pretty generic, but it gets the job done.

OVERALL,a great survival movie with a well executed plot, good acting, good score, intense and realistic effects, cinematic magic, and an accomplishing scare factor, but there are character development problems among some characters, lots of shaky cam, and some bits of predictability.