Two stars. Rating: R, for strong, gory violence and pervasive profanity
By Derrick Bang
Once upon a time, survival dramas were about precisely that: survival.
The courageous triumph of the human spirit. The resourceful — and ultimately successful — struggle to overcome adversity. If necessary, the noble sacrifice of a brave few, to save the remaining many.
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| Having survived a horrific plane crash, John Ottway (Liam Neeson) circles the wreckage, seeking supplies that will help him and the few other survivors. As it turns out, though, those who perished in the crash were the lucky ones; the rest are about to be stalked by ferocious killer wolves. |
Whether treated with grim seriousness (Deliverance) or as a pop-culture sub-genre — think back to all the high-profile 1970s “disaster flicks” — we always cheered the survivors who made it off the snow-covered mountain, or out of the inhospitable forest, the arid desert, the capsized ship or the burning building. It’s the ultimate wish fulfillment; we love to imagine being that heroic, that clever, that victorious.
But somewhere along the way — quite recently, during the past decade — survival films turned into snuff flicks: mainstream cousins of the horror genre’s “doomed teenager” twaddle, where the point is not to celebrate life, but to revel in gory death.
Think back to 2003’s Open Water, when we spent the film’s entire 79 minutes waiting for its two attractive stars to be eaten by sharks. Which they were. Or last year’s underwater caving snuff flick, Sanctum, which followed the more common formula: Only one gets to survive. Everybody else dies, and always stupidly, pointlessly and without the faintest semblance of valiant self-sacrifice.
Just like the nameless, faceless kids who get whittled down to one lone hold-out, in series such as Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Final Destination.
I’ll leave it to sociologists to discuss what this says about us as a society, in these early days of the 21st century, but I find it rather depressing.
The Grey is just such a film: dreary, hopeless and disheartening. No nobility here. No rewards for hard work or the determined application of human spirit. Just slaughter, with another victim checking out every 15 minutes or so.
The sole difference: Instead of a hockey-masked serial killer, a razor-fingered phantasm or Death itself, the monsters here are wolves.
Regular, normal Alaskan grey wolves.
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) has taken that template to heart, with his noisy, big-screen reboot of the former. This new and improved A-Team is even more absurd and more awesomely indestructible than its boob-tube ancestor, but I'll say this much: The cast 
, where he honed the light comedy action chops that he demonstrates so well in the midst of this madness.