What I Watched -- The Grey

Liam Neeson does his tough guy act again in The Grey.  But I'm okay with it, because he does it well enough.  With this character at least, it's not that he's so much into being a tough guy as that he just is a tough guy.  You learn a bit about his past and the nature of his "job at the end of the world," and you can see that he's just a guy who's been made that way.  Neeson's opportunities to show off his acting chops are spare here, but he manages to hang in there as the strong, silent type.

The aforementioned job of his is as a wolf hunter at a drilling rig in Alaska.  The wolves are relentless, and it's Ottway's (Neeson's) job to keep them at bay.  When they venture too close to the workers at the rig, "men unfit for mankind" as he describes them, it's Ottway's job to take them out.  Until, that is, a plane filled with men heading back to Anchorage goes down in the middle of nowhere.  The handful of survivors find themselves even farther from civilization than they had been in the oil fields, and surrounded by - you guessed it - hungry wolves.  This time Ottway is without his rifle.  Let your imagination take it from there.

This is a seriously macho film: man vs. man, man vs. animal, man vs. the elements.  It doesn't always end well, and it's rarely pretty in the process.  But somehow it also manages to be contemplative - perhaps it's all that snow quieting things down a bit.

Bottom line: bleak, bleak, bleak.  Literally grey most of the time.  But somehow, despite the fact that this is - let me say it again just so we're clear on the plot - a movie in which Liam Neeson fights with wolves, it's not terrible.  I'm not sure how that works.