The Grey'

[lety]

The Grey finds a group of roughnecks on board a plane in weather that would have grounded 99.9% of all flights. We know very little about these men, other than the fact Ottway's job at the drilling site was to kill wolves. We also see in the opening moments of the film that he's freshly out of a relationship with a woman he still loves and misses. We don't know what happened to break them up, but we know it left Ottway (Neeson) so devastated that he was on the verge of killing himself right before boarding the plane to return home.

His fellow passengers on this ill-fated flight are your standard horror movie fare, meaning they have one-dimensional personalities lifted straight from the supporting characters instructional manual. And after the one designated as the group's joker (Joe Anderson) makes a crack about the plane crashing, of course the plane crashes into the wilderness, in the middle of a blizzard, with no visible means of rescue, and without any supplies necessary to stay alive in the frigid conditions. Yet the pack of seven survivors do manage to make it through the first few hours before they learn that the weather isn't their only enemy. Oh no, these unfortunates have crashed down in the middle of the hunting range of a vicious pack of overgrown wolves.

 

Fortunately for them, Ottway's become a bit of a wolf whisperer (probably from having to shoot so many of the poor creatures who need to hunt to live). Ottway knows what the wolves are thinking, and tries to plot the group's escape path based on where they would least likely be forced to square off against the wolves. But just as the human survivors have Ottway's whispering skills, the wolf pack has an alpha male in charge who seems to have made it his goal in life to pick these intruders off one at a time. It's a battle of alpha males with the lives of the wolf pack and the ragtag pack of humans hanging in the balance. Forget the Super Bowl, this is the Ice Bowl pitting Team Human vs Team Wolf.