Starring: Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, Dallas Roberts, Delmot Mulroney
Director: Joe Carnahan
Category: IIB
Who would have thought that Liam Neeson would, in his late 50s, become a de rigueur presence in high-octane audio-visual spectacles?
His career-transforming turns in Taken and The A-Team might have startled many, but The Grey lets him flex his acting and action-hero muscles, in Joe Carnahan's gripping thriller with a philosophical subtext.
But first things first: one of the film's more distracting flaws is its under-par computer-generated imagery, with its digitally produced grey wolves - the animals which spur the story as they stalk and hunt down a group of air-crash survivors across the snowy outback of Alaska - coming out pretty fake.
Then again, these predators are only a backdrop to the actual fight against an existential greyness which led them to jobs at a petroleum refinery 'at the end of the world', as the lead character, John Ottway (Neeson), puts it in a voiceover at the beginning of the film.
His monologue is heard over images of the gloomy plant, as Ottway tells how the place is populated by 'men unfit for mankind' - a description brought vividly to life through the workers' rowdy behaviour as they settle into a small plane. True to genre rules, the gung-ho talk is a harbinger of pending disaster - an event which leaves Ottway and some of his co-workers defy the harsh weather and the pursuing grey wolves as they seek to return to civilisation.