'The Grey' review

Liam Neeson (Credit: Kimberley French/Open Road Films)

related items

Don't Make Liam Neeson Angry

A look at 'The Grey' star's most explosive roles

'Man on a Ledge' review

Sam Worthington and Elizabeth Banks star in a solidly...

Metromix picks: Best new movies

All the recent recommended releases

After a horrific plane crash strands a group of Alaskan oil drillers in a frozen no-man's-land, passenger John Ottway (Liam Neeson)—a sharpshooter hired by the oil company to protect its workers from wildlife—and the remaining survivors must make their way to safety. If they don't get eaten alive by a pack of ferocious wolves first. (TWI-HARD SPOILER ALERT: Not a single CGI wolf morphs into a shirtless Taylor Lautner.)

The buzz: Liam Neeson has played Oskar Schindler, Rob Roy, Darkman and Zeus (let's pretend that whole Qui-Gon Jinn thing never happened, OK?), but with "Taken," "Unknown" and now "The Grey," Neeson has hit a new stride as one of Hollywood's leading everyman-overcoming-impossible-odds heroes. Here Neeson reteams with "The A-Team" writer-director Joe Carnahan, who adapted "The Grey"'s screenplay from the short story "Ghost Walkers" along with author Ian MacKenzie Jeffers.

The verdict: Be forewarned: "The Grey" is not for the faint of heart. It contains one of the most unnerving plane crash sequences in recent memory, and at times feels less a film than an unrelenting series of traumatic events: characters fall from great heights, get pinned underwater and—the filmmakers' go-to nightmare scenario—are systematically picked off by a roving pack of man-eating wolves. It's a brutal, seemingly endless trek through an uninhabited arctic tundra; it's truly hell on earth. (In fact, English Lit geeks may find parallels between "The Grey" and Dante's "Inferno": Ottway's journey begins with a soul-searching moment alone in a wood, he is led by visions of his idyllic lover and guided by the poetry of his own personal Virgil—there's even seven survivors, one for each circle of hell.) Ultimately, "The Grey" succeeds as a chilling rumination on death—or, more precisely, the primal human desire to survive—bundled up in layers and layers of survival action film tropes (one's mind instantly goes to real-life survival story "Alive," which is name-checked in the film). John Ottway makes for one of Neeson's strongest performances to date: a conflicted hero with a complicated past, a man of few words who truly heeds the creed, "The ability to speak does not make you intelligent"—advice a certain Jedi master once gave a certain Jar Jar Binks in a certain childhood-demolishing prequel.

Did you know? Liam Neeson is not all existential survivin' and wolf sharpshootin'. Check out the actor's hilarious, scene-stealing cameo in Ricky Gervais' upcoming HBO mockumentary series "Life's Too Short."

Movie Trailer: