After Taken ignited an unlikely reinvention into cinema’s biggest action hero, audiences couldn’t get enough of watching Liam Neeson punching hapless goons in the throat while saving the day, something the marketing team behind The Grey was fully aware of.
Virtually every single teaser, trailer, and TV spot ended with Neeson’s John Ottway strapping broken glass to his fists and staring down a wolf, understandably creating the impression that not even the animal kingdom was immune from an ass-kicking.
However, the screen immediately cut to black afterwards to leave many viewers who’d paid for a ticket feeling swindled, when everybody involved in The Grey knew fine well that Neeson was never going to throw down with a wolf.
There was a brief credits scene that indicated he won the fight, but not showing it on-screen was mismarketing at its most egregious.
“I felt that to end it any other way, I felt that would be spoon-feeding the audience something that I wasn’t interested in spoon-feeding them,” Carnahan told MTV.
“I think the movie’s about something as massive and as mysterious as life and death”. While Carnahan is correct in his assessment that it was reflective of The Grey‘s thematic choices, promising something so heavily and then failing to provide it left a sour taste in the mouths of many.
Which is a shame because the film is excellent from start to finish, with Neeson giving a stellar performance as a bereaved widower who ends up stranded in the frozen wilderness following a plane crash the day after he contemplated taking his own life.
Based on the mindset established, it would have been all too easy for him to give up, but despite being plagued by grief, loss, and despair, he fights to make it out alive.
Existential and philosophical dilemmas were hardly par for the course in Neeson’s immediate post-Taken output, which makes The Grey an even more refreshing change of pace.
The dwindling number of human survivors are hopelessly stranded, outnumbered, and outwitted by their feral pursuers who’ve lived in this harsh terrain for generations, plunging the entire group into a physical and moral battle that pits their determination to make it out alive against the encroaching hopelessness of the realisation they probably won’t.
Sure, it was a sneaky move on the studio’s part to promise Neeson vs.
Alpha Wolf and then flip the bird at anyone convinced to see the movie based on that tantalising logline alone, but The Grey endures as one of the finest Hollywood survival stories to come along in a long while, with a bite that comfortably matches its bark.
