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90It'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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88Sit through the entire credits. There's one more shot still to come. Not that you wouldn't be content without it.
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83Genre movies are often mere excuses for shows of gore and tricked-up suspense, and while The Grey should satisfy anyone who seeks only that there's something more profound and pure at its heart, making it a genuinely entertaining thriller that puts a chill through you in more ways than one.
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80I pretty much loved this movie from start to finish - risible implausibilities, insufficiently explained premise and all. An admirably spare survival thriller, The Grey (nice title!) abounds in qualities that are rare in movies of its type. It's quiet, contemplative, and almost haiku-like in its simplicity.
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80What is surprising is how poetic the movie is, partly thanks to its high-lonesome sound design and the desolate beauty of its visuals, but mostly because of its star, Liam Neeson.
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80The gristle inside this movie is one of the things that save it from being simply a series of challenges.
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Jan 26, 201280Like Anthony Mann's "The Naked Spur" (1953) or "Man of the West" (1958), the movie draws on the terrifying beauty of the natural world and generates tension from the volatile dynamics of a carefully observed group.
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78The film is an intelligent study of the will to live. It's so strong that even a suicidal man rises to the occasion.
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75There's an almost poetic quality to the way things develop, with characters becoming increasingly introspective.
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75Forsaken in a cruel wilderness, a man looks to God and pleads for help. Receiving no answer, he says, "F- -k, I'll do it myself."
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75The setting and fatalistic musings of The Grey invite comparison to Sean Penn's stirring 2007 adventure "Into the Wild"; in its more metaphysical moments, told in impressionistic flashbacks, it recalls last year's "The Tree of Life."
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75A terrifically exciting, deeply unsettling survivalist epic.
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75Call The Grey "Deliverance" Lite, with snow, and wolves. And call it a solid January surprise.
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75The Grey avoids smug clichés, takes you to places you least expect and settles for no comfortable solutions, while it explores the dark shadows of the male psyche and finds more emotional fragility there than you find in the usual phony macho myths from Hollywood.
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75There's little in Joe Carnahan's previous films, marked by their frenetic, fanboy-friendly overindulgences, to predict the cold blast of The Grey, an old-fashioned, neatly arrayed survival story that almost reads like a reaction to the excesses of his past work.
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70Mr. Carnahan has till now been pigeonholed, and rightly, by comedy shoot-'em-ups like "Smokin' Aces" and "The A-Team." But here he is with The Grey - certainly an adventure film but one with a spiritual ingredient that is both surprising and fiercely resonant.
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70True to its grim prospectus, The Grey dwells in haunted machismo to the very end.
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70Don't be mistaken -- this isn't an artsy thriller. It is still, at heart, men vs. wolves, and the wolves definitely have the home-court advantage.
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Jan 19, 201270The Grey, a man's-man of a genre picture that will satisfy the action audience while reminding more discerning viewers what they saw in director Joe Carnahan's decade-old breakthrough, "Narc."
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65The movie might not be a vengeance-driven wolf-man cage fight, but in subverting those escapist expectations, it sinks its teeth far deeper and more memorably.
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63The 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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63The Grey, whose clipped title, grim swagger, and lost-in-the-outback themes conjure up visions of that Alec Baldwin/Anthony Hopkins classic, "The Edge," devolves into a predictable man-against-nature, and man-against-fellow man, affair.
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63At times, the animatronic effects used to create the wolves are too obvious, and the one-by-one kill-off plotline employed in so many horror films gives The Grey a plodding predictability. At nearly two hours, it's also too long.
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60Moment to moment, the film is gripping and beautiful to behold (props to cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi for the mesmerizingly grainy, achromatic visuals). But caveat emptor to those expecting a hinterlands gloss on "Taken" with rapacious curs in place of nefarious Albanians.
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58Neeson brings gravitas to the table, acting as a legitimizing counterweight to the overwrought dialogue and flesh-tearing lupine hysteria. But in a scenario this persistently ludicrous, he can only do so much.
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58You see the pattern here? Winter-release slot + travel budget + Liam Neeson = slightly preposterous, routinely violent, apparently lucrative action movie in which the Irish-born star signals inner emotional conflict with his handsomely mashed boxer's face while settling outer physical conflict with his boxer's fists.
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50Neeson's gravity elevates the action, and there's a fine, prickly performance by an actor new to me, Frank Grillo, as the asshole of the group. But The Grey, despite moments of sublimity, is as predictable as a funeral. When Ottway angrily calls out to God, the nonanswer is sadly redundant.
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50The computer-generated wolves have more personality than any of the dull characters in The Grey.
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50It'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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50The picture's dialogue-heavy stretches and ambiguous finale could leave ticketbuyers impatient for less chatter and more chomping.
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Jan 24, 201240There's too much Jack London, and, as they systematically pick off the stragglers, too many CGI wolves go unpunched.
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Jan 19, 201240This is admirably ambitious, but Carnahan's not nearly good enough a writer or director to pull it off: the results are portentous, muddled and not nearly as entertaining as Neeson's usual face-punching antics.
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25A 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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25Carnahan didn't make a movie unfit for mankind but it certainly isn't worth mankind's money.
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25Neeson is always compelling, even in a movie as ridiculous as The Grey.