The Grey: Critic Reviews

Winter-release slot + travel budget + Liam Neeson = slightly preposterous, routinely violent, apparently lucrative action movie...

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.

Neeson confers weight and muscle on the movie, and endows it with a kind of emotional dignity it would not otherwise have.

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.

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.

I was told there would be more wolf-punching.

Joe Carnahan's great adventure follows Neeson's lead and stays steely to the end, even as its grizzled winners take nothing.

Certainly an adventure film but one with a spiritual ingredient that is both surprising and fiercely resonant.

This gritty, relentlessly intense survival tale easily gets dibs on "feel-cold" movie of the year.

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.

The Grey, despite moments of sublimity, is as predictable as a funeral. When Ottway angrily calls out to God, the nonanswer is sadly redundant.

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.

There's an actual human element to go with Carnahan's Jack London-inspired depiction of humans against the elements.

The movie draws on the terrifying beauty of the natural world and generates tension from the volatile dynamics of a carefully observed group.

Devolves into a predictable man-against-nature, and man-against-fellow man, affair.

"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.

"The Grey" may appeal to those who like entrails, tough talk and bad endings. All others beware.

"The Grey" is a meat-and-potatoes movie about manly survival -- red meat and whatever kind of potatoes imply macho.

Prepare to be devastated.

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.

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.

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.

Three-fifths of a solid film!

The film sustains some suspense and brooding atmosphere for its first half, but eventually the cliches of character and dialogue drag it struggling to ground.

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.