I have this theory that George Lucas is responsible for Liam Neeson’s late-career transformation into what a gossip-rag hack might term “the thinking man’s action star.” (The furiously entertaining Jason Statham, on the other hand, would be the popcorn-muncher’s action star.) The turning point I talk about is, of course, the widely reviled Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, where Neeson must have discovered, for the first time, the perks of playing to the gallery. His memorable parts, from earlier, fumed with lofty historical rhetoric. He was Ethan Frome, Oskar Schindler, Rob Roy, Michael Collins, Jean Valjean – now, over and over, he’s just The Big Lug You Don’t Want to Piss Off. His rhetoric, these days, is mythical, warmed-up leftovers from Qui-Gon Jinn’s pop-existential manual. In Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, Neeson, as John Ottway, is once again the Jedi master in charge of padawans who must be taught the way of things. Only, it isn’t outer space any longer. The action now unspools in the interstices of the soul.
That’s a strange place to be for a film whose premise points at a solid, frill-free B-movie. The opening stretch establishes Ottway as an expert shot – his job is to protect a crew of oil workers from wolves. (This is Alaska, and the frames are saturated with so much snow that the film, justly, should have been titled The White.) On the way home from work, their plane runs into a blizzard. Its guts are ripped apart with stomach-churning audio effects that sound like the gates of hell juddering open. And Ottway and his colleagues find themselves in a survival movie, a band of bickering brothers who must face knee-deep snow, cliffs, snowstorms, rapids, and, most terrifying of all, packs of ravenous wolves, whose disembodied eyes, in the dark, light up like stars in an eerie sky. We brace ourselves, now, for a creature-feature, with nothing more in its sights than (a) who will be eaten up next, and (b) who, along with Ottway, will make it to the end.
But in an early scene, after the crash, Carnahan reveals that he’s after something higher – a B+ movie perhaps. Ottway and a few other survivors gather around a colleague who is clearly dying. Gasping for breath, the man is unable to comprehend his situation. Ottway tells him, calmly, “You are going to die, that’s what’s happening.” He doesn’t reach for platitudes to reassure a twitching, bleeding, terrified individual drawing his last breaths. “Look at me,” he commands instead. “You’re all right.” The moment is allowed to linger agonisingly, and even after the man dies, Carnahan refuses to cut away from his face. If he is staring into the void, we, along with him, seem to be doing the same, and the film has transmuted into Robinson Crusoe-meets-Walden, grappling with higher thoughts and, sometimes, even a higher power. Long stretches of dialogue (some may label them longueurs) are consecrated to musings about existing versus living, facing fears, and acknowledging that man is, in essence, an animal.
The Grey doesn’t always succeed in reconciling its twin ambitions of excitement and existentialism, but Neeson remains a commanding presence throughout. He invites our empathy. We want him to make it back alive, even if, at the beginning, he was seen seeking death, sticking the muzzle of his rifle into his mouth. Irony seems to be a popular contrivance with the makers of castaway movies. Even the best of them, Cast Away, toyed with the notion of a FedEx employee, to whom being on time was everything, stranded on an island where time had no meaning. And, of course, the narrative outline of The Grey has been a popular contrivance in Hollywood for decades: Man deposited in a hostile, alien environment learns that he is not the alpha creature after all. Set this story in space, and you get Alien. Set it in water, and you get Jaws. Set it on earth, and you get everything from the Allies-in-Germany movies to The Lord of the Rings. The Grey is a testament as much to human will as the endless malleability of this single-line plot.
An edited version of this piece can be found here.
Copyright ©2012 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
KayKay
May 26, 2012
The Grey was a pleasant surprise, especially coming after Carnahan’s disappointing Smokin’ Aces and the thoroughly mediocre A-Team movie adaptation. A survival epic that surprises you with some of it’s unexpected left turns although…SPOILER ALERT….the most gripping scene in the trailers (Ottway “MacGyvering” a serious wolf-punching weapon out of discarded mini-bar bottles) turns out to be a gigantic cheat.
I for one am tickled pink at Neeson’s current iconic stature as the Go-To action guy if you’re looking for a little mileage in your heroes . That look of weathered intensity coupled with stoic resolve not to mention (quoting Spielberg) that “cigarettes and cognac” baritone is a natural fit for action movies, although I’m still taken aback that this talented actor needed this particular genre for a late-career boost.
KayKay
May 26, 2012
My favourite scene in Taken (an effective though generic action thriller elevated solely by Neeson’s commanding screen presence), an abject lesson on how to use your leading man’s intensity and voice to generate the most tension-filled and whistle-worthy moment in a Hollywood actioner in a long time…followed by the Captain remake, an abject lesson on how to throroughly bollocks it up the way only Kolly/Tolly and Bollywood can, because they have no freaking clue on how to stage, shoot, pace or edit an action movie.
Raj Balakrishnan
May 26, 2012
Nice review. Did you catch the last scene, after the end credits. There is a minor twist in the end, not that it matters.
brangan
May 27, 2012
Raj: No, I didn’t. Can you tell me what it is (with a SPOILER alert)? Thanks.
venkatesh
May 27, 2012
KayKay: Though i get your point but its a false comparison – Taken is an action movie, Virudhagiri is a Vijaykanth movie ( not an action movie ) – its a genre that does not exist in Hollywood.
sam
May 27, 2012
**********SPOILER alert*******
In the last scene, the back of Ottway’s head is laying by the side of the wolf’s stomach. so its unknown as to who is the victor…
Raj Balakrishnan
May 27, 2012
Baradwaj : SPOILER ALERT – there is a shot of the wolf and neeson lying beside each other – probably neeson manages to kill or seriously wound the wolf.
KayKay
May 27, 2012
“Virudhagiri is a Vijaykanth movie ( not an action movie ) – its a genre that does not exist in Hollywood”
And for that, we can all say:
vijay
May 28, 2012
Vijaykanth’s movies are in no way a reflection of the current state-of-the-art as far as Tamil action films are concerned. VK himself has been irrelevant in the industry these past 3 or 4 years. His movies are easy pickings, sitting ducks. what’s the fun in that? Its all so lopsided. You dont even need to compare his movies to something like Taken to show how awful they are. A fairer comparison would have been to take say, an Ayan(which was a hit and even critically faired decently) and then compare it’s execution with that of Taken if the intent is to pit Tamil films against Hollywood actioners. There are a lot of awfully made Hollywood actioners/thrillers every year considering all that money and resources they have at their disposal. Can I compare say, a Freddy got fingered with Delhi Belly and conclude Hindi films fare a lot better in comedy?
KayKay
May 29, 2012
Ok, the VK to Neeson comparison was cheeky and below the belt, I’ll give you that.
Having said that, let’s take some of your points for the purpose of discussion:
“Vijaykanth’s movies are in no way a reflection of the current state-of-the-art as far as Tamil action films are concerned”
Errr…excuse me, which Tamil movie is state-of-the-art, which in my book implies a cutting-edge standard by which all others are measured? Pray tell which K/Wood product has set the standard in editing, cinematography, special effects or action choreography that’s the acknowledged benchmark for others? We have come close to or equalled the best of what American or European cinema can offer in certain technical feats, but actually being at the forefront of innovation? Nigga, please!
And let’s get one thing straight. There are NO action films in Tamil. Take it from a junkie of the genre. The usual hodge podge of melodrama, romance, inane comedy and songs which also happens to have 3 fight scenes and a shit-load of macho punch-lines in the dialogue does NOT constitute an action movie. I’m yet to see a Tamil equivalent of Speed, Die Hard, Rambo, Fast & Furious, Transporter or pretty much the entire direct-to-DVD ouevre of Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal; movies that exist solely to deliver the visceral thrills of fights, car chases, explosions, effects and other assorted pyrotechnics for our viewing pleasure.
So, if you’re going to defend action in Tamil movies, it needs to be within the context of how well choreographed the few action sequences that do exist in them are.
On that score, neither the occasional well staged fight scene in Ayan or Vettaiyaadu Vilayaadu, nor the brutally efficient slicing of machetes in Virumaandi not to mention a brilliantly staged rope-bridge stunt in Raavanan is going to convince me we’re experiencing a Renaissance of Action Choreography in Tamil movies. By and large, the stunt work in most Tamil movies are laughable, the fights embarrasing and the whole editing and filming of them amateurish.
Forget Hollywood, See the boundaries of fight and action choreography redefined in Wilson Yip’s SPL, IP Man and Flashpoint (Hong Kong), Prachya Pinkaew’s Ong Bak (Thailand), Jeong-beom Lee’s The Man From Nowhere (Korea) and Gareth Evans’ Merantau Warrior and The Raid Redemption (Indonesia) and then let’s have a conversation of about how “cutting-edge” action is in Tamil movies.
vijay
May 31, 2012
I said state-of-the-art “as far as Tamil movies are concerned”. I didn’t say world class or better than some obscure Korean film. And regarding these comparisons,The genres, expectations.audiences,resources available, culture, scale of production and just about anything else you can think of are completely different for the film industries from these different countries to attempt a direct one-on-one comparison just like that. Even a Hindi vs Tamil comparison can get absurd sometimes. And a Tamil vs Hollywood is even more absurd, comparing the output of an industry belonging to just a state with that of an industry belonging to an entire country (and from a different continent altogether).Atleast take the top films the Indian film industries as a whole has to offer(which includes everything from Sindhi to Malayalam) and then compare it with whatever you want to, if you really have to do that. Not that I would pit Agent Vinod against Mission Impossible 4 even then.
KayKay
July 7, 2012
I’m wet with anticipation!