THE GREY, starring Liam Neeson

The first thing I’m going to take issue with is the spelling of the title. There had to have been a knock-down drag-out fight over this, or I’m not a spelling freak. In my time, I could’ve taken on Abby Mullen, and that’s no small potatoes in the spelling arena, people!

So listen, in America, the letter A is used, and in England, the letter E is used, get it? It’s easy. (My dear friend, don’t worry, Earl Grey Tea has an E as you know.) So, since this movie is set in Alaska (“Let’s all walk to Anchorage!”), it should be The Gray.

In more spelling disasters, I can’t find out how to spell Mr. Neeson’s character’s name. On Wikipedia, it’s Ottoway, but other sites use Ottway or Ottaway. In the movie, it’s pronounced “Ah-way” as in, “Let’s get Ah-way from here, there are wolves about.” But enough of that. In a world where the word “Farve” is spelled “Favre” we can’t nit-pick.

The movie is not bad. Go ahead and see it if your other option is Albert Nobbs, but if you’re choosing between The Grey and Man on a Ledge, I’d go with the edgy ledgy one, because at least it has suspense.

There’s no suspense here. There is a lot of scariness—a plane crash, a lot of loud, lunging wolves who tear people apart, howling wolves, circling wolves, advancing wolves, running wolves, even (at night) scary little bright wolf eyes against blackness—but there isn’t any suspense about what is going to happen in the end.

Once the plane goes down and the survivors walk away from the wreckage, thereby breaking the number one “When You’re Lost” rule (that is, “hug a tree,” or in this case an airplane), you know that only the Liam Neeson character is going to make it out. You know this because you don’t know any of the other characters, you don’t get to know them, and you don’t really care about them all that much. One by one these people die, mauled by wolves. Sort of like in The Long Walk or And Then There Were None. Sort of like Survivor with more violent voting. Sort of like the Republican primaries.

There is some tedium because it’s just wolf after wolf after wolf after wolf until you’re thinking, C’mon already, Alpha!

Back to the Walking Away part. You know, this is serious stuff. If a planeload of people goes missing, people are going to look for survivors at the crash site, not somewhere else. There are things called transponders and black boxes, not to mention that many people have cell phones (so I’ve heard) that have GPSes right inside! There is also a cartload of food and lots of dry clothes in everyone’s luggage. Why walk away from all that?

The reason given is that the wolves smell all the blood and death and will be drawn to it. Okay, Move the bodies, or burn them. We are reminded throughout this movie that wolves don’t like to get close to fire. The plane’s wings are full of fuel, so maybe burning a bunch of luggage or whatever would work at least as well as trying to outrun wolves for several days in the middle of the end of the world.

Brian was really not amused, knowing a thing or two about camping. He mentioned that it would be smarter to climb trees and get a little sleep rather than trying to stay awake around the camp fire all night in case the wolves come. He also had no tolerance for one character who drinks Jack Daniels rather freely. Apparently (who knew?), drinking alcohol results—after the initial flush—in a temperature drop, not a great thing for surviving in an Alaska blizzard.

Another thing that bothered me was that Mr. Ottaway (Neeson) is mourning the death of his wife. I just don’t like this, because I felt like a voyeur on Mr. Neeson’s grief. He keeps bringing out his dead wife’s picture. She keeps telling him not to be afraid. (There were people who were surprised she was dead, but it was over-the-top obvious, so I’m not giving anything away here.) Maybe it’s helpful to be an actor and actually be able to work through powerful emotions like grief and bereavement at work like this. If so, I hope he is doing better, but it’ s only been three years or so, and I was super uncomfortable watching this.

There’s a fascinating theological bit in this movie. Ottaway is very clear in his belief that there is no God and no life after death. He says he wants to believe, but doesn’t believe. This situation here is real, not that fairy tale of life after death. Then, in extremis, he yells at the white sky, “Fine, you blankety-blank, I’m calling on you now! Answer me, blankety-blank it!” And I just want to say, as a Worshiper of Him you called Blankety-Blank, “Why should He be at your beck and call when all your life you have rejected Him?” Ottaway wants to live his life in full-blast rejection of God and then, when it suits him to call on God (as that Great Blankety-Blank in the sky, to be sure, not in any repentant, humble, worshipful manner), he expects God to rush over and say, “Yes, Master, what are your commands now that you are in trouble?”

And one teeny more thing: Ottaway falls into a rushing Alaskan river in the dead of winter. A few minutes later, he’s dry. There was no intervening snow cave with fire to dry out wet clothes. I tried not to care about this, but maybe I should have shouted, “Aha! See, God did answer your prayer! You’re dry, aren’t you?”

We always stay for all the credits because I love the credits. There’s always some fun thing to see. The Assistant to So-and-So will have a really cool name or you’ll see someone who has the same name as a friend of yours, or whatever. For this movie, we’d been told to stay to the end because “there’s a surprise at the end.”

Now it’s true that if you left Rise of the Planet of the Apes before the end of the credits, you completely missed out. The end of Wall Street 2 is in the credits. Et cetera. So we waited. Don’t blame me for your disappointment if you do this.

The movie proper ends with Neeson taking on Alpha mano a lobo, so I assumed we’d see him lying bleeding and a pretty Eskimo girl would step out of the forest and shoot the wolf to smithereens, thereby giving Ottaway life and new love. Or, deus ex machina-like, perhaps a helicopter would hear the ever-present beep beep from the GPS watch he’s been wearing all this time. But no, it’s just a five second blip of wolf and man, one of them dead, guess which one, and it’s still a heck of a hike to Anchorage and the rest of the pack is still there.

It would have been absolutely fantastic had the last image been not of Ottaway and Alpha at all, but of rescuers arriving at the crash scene shouting, “Hello! Hello! Anybody here?” Finding no one, they would have looked out at the blizzard-smoothed expanse of snow surrounding the crash site, and someone would have said, “Well, at least we know that what we have here is all there is. No one would have been stupid enough to try to walk out of here.” At least then we would have had a nice public service announcement: Hug that Tree.

Without Neeson, this one’s a flop. With him, It’s okay. If you get popcorn, beware, there’s some graphic scenes of wolves and human bodies. Plenty of language, principally a particular word that seems to feature fairly frequently in films.