Critics reviews

Joe Carnahan’s moody, macho action classic is as much a reverie on manhood and mortality as it is a terrifying thriller about a group of plane-crash survivors in Alaska being attacked by wild animals.

Carnahan—whose career contains as many unrealized or cancelled projects as completed ones—specializes in macho themes, sometimes exaggerating them to cartoonish proportions (as in his underrated take on The A-Team, which also starred Neeson), at other times deconstructing them. The Grey, his most accomplished film, is a thorough and surprisingly philosophical dismantling of the wilderness survival thriller, and one of the grimmest movies to come out of Hollywood in the last decade.

...Mostly I just want to watch Liam Neeson fight a wolf. Since the point has been pressed, yes, I do recognize that this is a fundamentally superficial desire. But then, a lot of man-hours at union scale went into implanting—implanting, not satiating—this desire in my brain. Dude, you're the one who brought it up. It seems somewhat in bad faith for The Grey's writer-director Joe Carnahan to interrogate an appetite of his own devising.

There's a vivid physicality in the images, director Joe Carnahan (whose previous film was The A-Team) evoking the bruising sensation of falling through tree-branches, or the sickening judder of a plane in trouble. The Grey isn't about monsters or slashers. It's not even Man vs. Wolf, more like Man vs. Limits of Man – a thrilling existentialist parable about men forced to confront the inevitable and finding strength in themselves, their own physical being.