'The Grey': The Reviews Are In!

Critics give mostly positive reviews to the Liam Neeson's wolf-punching thriller. By Kevin P. Sullivan

For the third January in a row, Liam Neeson returns to kick ass more than any other 59-year-old we know. This time he isn't taking down sex traffickers like in "Taken" or whatever he was fighting in "Unknown." No, this time, it's wolves.

For a movie that was sold on the notion of wolf punching, "The Grey" has received primarily positive reviews for its deeper-than-you'd-think story and characters.

Check out what the critics are saying about "The Grey."

The Story
"We meet Neeson's character, a heartbroken loner named John Ottway, on the verge of suicide and thinking back, obsessively, to the woman who got away. His demons temporarily quelled, Ottway boards a small plane with his fellow refinery workers and in one of the most nerve-racking flights ever put on film, the aircraft runs afoul of bad weather and crashes. (For a turbulence wimp like me, this scene was not easy.)" — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

The Star
"Having paid his quality biopic dues as Oskar Schindler, Michael Collins and Alfred Kinsey, Mr. Neeson has, at least for now, turned to the rougher and perhaps more lucrative work of action heroism. It takes nothing away from his earlier achievements to note that he's really good at it. He conveys a ferocious and absolute seriousness even when the going gets silly, and he finds the soul in each new angry-everyman cipher he is asked to play." — A.O. Scott, New York Times

The Wolves
" 'The Grey' is an unrelenting demonstration that wolves have no opinion. When they attack, it's not personal. They've spent untold millennia learning how to survive, naked and without weapons, in fearsome places like the Arctic Circle in the dead of winter. They aren't precisely unarmed; they have their teeth and claws, but how far would that get us, even if we had rifles?" — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The Director
"We've come, in vain, to see [Neeson] danse-macabre with wolves, and the film's director, Joe Carnahan, provides the occasional horror-film sneak attack. He also manages to create one of the movies' more nightmarish plane crashes and conclude with just the sort of ludicrous finale that paying customers who've seen the ads might assume they would be getting a whole film of." — Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

The Final Word
"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, which is, after all, the task all of us face each day, even when we're not fending off wolves with broken glass duct-taped to our knuckles." — Dana Stevens, Slate

Liam Neeson in "The Grey"Photo: Open Road Films

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