The Grey Reviews
Top CriticThe Grey remains a genuinely gripping survival story and a refreshing change from stale urban action flicks.
The Grey is about raging against the dying of the light but also about accepting it with peace once the fight has been lost.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The Grey, despite moments of sublimity, is as predictable as a funeral. When Ottway angrily calls out to God, the nonanswer is sadly redundant.
Somewhere along the line, apparently, it was decided that having men fight for their lives is not enough to hang a movie on. It has to be a movie about Big Ideas.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
"The Grey" may appeal to those who like entrails, tough talk and bad endings. All others beware.
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| Original Score: D
The film's conflicting tones never quite mesh, but some fine acting and powerful moments make "The Grey" watchable, if not entirely compelling.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It may be too conventional for the art-house crowd, yet too arty for the megaplex. I prefer to call it an unusually reflective blood-and-guts saga.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The film sustains some suspense and brooding atmosphere for its first half, but eventually the clichés of character and dialogue drag it struggling to ground.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
What starts as a tense and moody survival thriller fairly quickly becomes tedious, forced and far-fetched as a septet of men is preyed upon by a wolf pack in the Alaska wilderness.
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| Original Score: 2/4
A handsome but gabby take on the standard survivalist thriller that's more concerned with lofty metaphysics than which poor blockhead is about to bite it next.
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| Original Score: 1/4
This gritty, relentlessly intense survival tale easily gets dibs on "feel-cold" movie of the year.
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| Original Score: B+
For all its macho standoffs and action set pieces and menacing off-screen howling, The Grey is at heart a simple moral fable about how true heroism consists in helping other human beings to live as long and die as well as they can.
Certainly an adventure film but one with a spiritual ingredient that is both surprising and fiercely resonant.
As stripped of colour as its title, apart from the red of flowing blood and burning eyes, The Grey urges contemplation on man as the human animal, one suddenly cast into the wilderness where real beasts dwell.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's a fine, tough little movie, technically assured and brutally efficient, with a simple story that ventures into some profound existential territory without making a big fuss about it.
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| Original Score: 3/5
The Grey has a certain muscular pull: It's a tough-as-nails study of hardened men struggling with the ostensibly conflicting pulls of stoic masculinity on one hand and love, faith and fear of death on the other.
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| Original Score: 6.5/10
Devolves into a predictable man-against-nature, and man-against-fellow man, affair.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Memories of The Grey will melt away before spring's first sunny day, but it will satisfy both fans of Neeson's serious performances in films like Kinsey and those who line up for his more recent spate of I-will-kill-everyone flicks.
True to its grim prospectus, The Grey dwells in haunted machismo to the very end.
It's cheap the way "The Grey'' wants to be both a Liam Neeson "Quit Taking My Stuff'' movie and an existential thriller about survival.
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| Original Score: 2/4
"The Grey" yanked me upright in my seat. It is, even as melodramatic and sometimes implausible entertainment, the best studio movie in a long time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
This is much more than a man vs. nature vs. animal thriller.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
Joe Carnahan's great adventure follows Neeson's lead and stays steely to the end, even as its grizzled winners take nothing.
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| Original Score: 4/5
There's an actual human element to go with Carnahan's Jack London-inspired depiction of humans against the elements.
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| Original Score: 3/4
When I learned of Sarah Palin hunting wolves from a helicopter, my sensibilities were tested, but after this film, I was prepared to call in more helicopters.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Neeson has the ability, unmatched by any other Hollywood leading man, to convey soul-deep anguish. In this picture, it's shattering in its intensity.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The movie draws on the terrifying beauty of the natural world and generates tension from the volatile dynamics of a carefully observed group.
Winter-release slot + travel budget + Liam Neeson = slightly preposterous, routinely violent, apparently lucrative action movie...
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| Original Score: C+
The wolves seem to have watched a lot of "Friday the 13th" movies, because they have a knack for pouncing out of the shadows that rivals the mad skills of Jason Voorhees.
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| Original Score: 1/4
"The Grey" is a meat-and-potatoes movie about manly survival -- red meat and whatever kind of potatoes imply macho.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
While some of the effects work is a little obvious, the film does a largely first-rate job of simulating the punishing environment the characters have to push against.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
Ultimately, the film feels less like a genuine existential thriller than a movie aping the conventions of one.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Moment to moment, the film is gripping and beautiful to behold (props to cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi for the mesmerizingly grainy, achromatic visuals).
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| Original Score: 3/5
I was told there would be more wolf-punching.
After the excesses of 'The A-Team', this is Carnahan stripping it back to basics - seven men, one wilderness, countless beasts.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Impressively lensed by Masanobu Takayanagi on aptly rugged terrain in British Columbia, The Grey is thoroughly persuasive in its depiction of desperate men battling unforgiving elements.
A man's-man of a genre pic that will satisfy the action audience while reminding more discerning viewers what they saw in director Joe Carnahan's decade-old breakthrough, Narc.
