The Grey

Like the stranded-plane crash survivors in its story, The Grey dies a slow and gloomy death, leaving viewers out in the cold.

This testosterone-fueled psychological thriller from director Joe Carnahan (The A-Team) is a raw tale of survival that unfortunately has a promising setup without much of a payoff.

The story takes place in rural Alaska, where an oil-drilling team is flying toward its latest job when the small plane crashes into the snow. Only seven men survive, unsure of where they are or whether they will be rescued.

One of them is Ottway (Liam Neeson), a troubled loner with survival training who agrees to lead his bickering colleagues on a perilous trek to nowhere. Then another problem arrives in the form of a territorial pack of wolves. As the men move campsites, with their supplies dwindling, they must battle not only the wolves and the elements, but each other.

The Grey is most compelling in its first act, especially in its harrowing depiction of the plane crash and its aftermath.

After that, however, the film becomes bogged down in horror-movie conventions, with its subjects lost in the wilderness inevitably waiting for their demise one by one. All of the spiritual campfire talk and philosophical mumbo-jumbo among guys with icicles on their beards simply feels like filler waiting for the next brutal wolf encounter.

Carnahan demonstrates some maturity as a filmmaker, showing less reliance on frenetic editing and heavy-handed gimmicks. He smartly allows the setting to become a character as integral as any human, and even though the conditions during filming must have been harsh, they yield some beautiful if bleak shots of the wintry landscapes.

Neeson gives a strong performance as a resourceful man whose personal life is broken and desperate, but there isn’t much meaningful character development among the rest of the, um, survivors.

The film, which was adapted from a short story by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers (Death Sentence), conveys a growing sense of isolation and dread.

Yet with a failure to sustain its initial level of suspense and too many gaps in logic, it might have worked better at an abbreviated length on screen as well.

Rated R, 117 minutes.