The Grey (2011)
Directed by Joe Carnahan
After their plane crashes in Alaska, six oil workers are led by a skilled huntsman to survival, but a pack of merciless wolves haunts their every step.
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What critics compared The Grey to
Glass’ story has actually inspired a couple previous films and we’ve seen a number of similar survival films in the past, ranging from "The Edge” to Joe Carnahan’s “The Grey” and others, but Inarritu and his cast all bring their A-game to create something so visceral in its authenticity that at times it almost feels as if you’re watching a gorgeously shot documentary.
The natural-lighting gimmick was done better by Kubrick in Barry Lyndon; the basic story was told before in 1971’s Man in the Wilderness, which took up nearly an hour less of our time; the sometimes discordant score (by Ryuichi Sakamoto among others) recalls Neil Young’s fuzzbox music for Jim Jarmusch’s acid western Dead Man (and this film’s dependence on an Indian helping an ailing white man was already parodied nicely by Jarmusch); and the symbolic heaviness of man against nature got some play in Joe Carnahan’s underrated existential drama The Grey.
The Revenant makes the guys in The Grey look like weenies, and those were some tough dudes!
These moments are interesting because they are human, and that’s not a quality I immediately associate with the director of “Narc,’’ “Smokin’ Aces,’’ and “The A-Team.’’
Director Joe Carnahan ("Smokin' Aces") literally goes for the jugular -- the scenes of men being eaten like fresh gazelles are harrowing -- but he also shows real sensitivity, lingering on faces as awful decisions are made.
Cowriter (with 'Ghost Walkers' author Ian Mackenzie Jeffers)/director Joe Carnahan has had an up and down career, squandering early promise with misfires like "Smokin' Aces" and "The A-Team."
In previous efforts such as Smokin’ Aces (which came across like an Americanized Guy Ritchie on crystal meth) and the aforementioned TV remake, he was out of control and confusing.
After the deliberately cartoonish hyperbole of Smokin’ Aces (2006) and The A-Team (2010), director Joe Carnahan finally appears to be making good on the early promise he showed a decade ago with his sophomore film, the gritty police thriller Narc (2002).
In the hospital, Whip encounters heroin addict Nicole (Kelly Reilly, “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows”) and a terminal cancer patient (James Badge Dale, “The Grey”) who reminds them to embrace life while they still have it.
A third patient (James Badge Dale, "The Grey," making a big mark in a small role) arrives with gallows humor to talk about fate and God and so Whip tells Nicole he'll visit her.
Blending The High and the Mighty and The Lost Weekend — or, from this year’s movies, The Grey and Smashed — Flight at its best marks an advance for its director and a triumph for its star.
Wrath of Man may soon occupy the same rarified air as Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, another film anchored by an aging action star that promised revenge and delivered something more.
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“Green Room” launches you into this grungy world of punk music filled with Nazis and twenty-something-year-old kids who couldn’t care less and fuses it with the viciousness found in Joe Carnahan’s “The Grey” along with the dilapidated ambiance of “SLC Punk” and shades of "The Cabin of the Woods" to deliver a one-of-a-kind experience that is terrifically unforgettable.
Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, whose work shooting 2011’s The Grey was exemplary, regularly transitions focus in single shots from foreground to background, which is about as flashy as the palette gets.
Although some recurring dream-like sequences (featuring Famke Janssen playing the now dead mutant Jean Gray wanting Logan to come over to the other side) may feel like lesser such moments from the Liam Neeson flick "The Grey," overall I liked the pic for what it's trying to be and how it turns out.
Not that he’s been gone that long–or deviated that much from his persona–but this later-stage butt-kicking does call to mind Liam Neeson ’s recent resurgence in movies like “ Taken ,” “ The Grey ” and “ Non-Stop .”
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Audiences have recently been treated to a couple of great American films about men wrestling with emotions: Joe Carnahan’s The Grey and Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines .
(I'd argue that, in terms of Hollywood survival epics from 2012, The Grey is a much more compelling look at God and his inherent silence.)