As you can see we have another movie review to do today… This one will be a little different though, in that I wasn’t that impressed this time. I’ll admit to being a big fan of movies in general, them being my preferred way to waste a Saturday afternoon ever since I was kid. I don’t usually find myself paying to see one that I would really admit wasn’t worth seeing. However, this one comes close…

SPOILER ALERT – In my review of this movie today there will be details that might spoil the movie for you so read with that in mind. However, I will be doing my best to persuade you to choose another movie anyway so either way, you’ve been warned!

   When I first saw “The Grey” advertised during the previews at the theater several months back it caught my attention for a couple of reasons. First as a normal red blooded American male, I like action films and second it appeared to be a survival story… Yep, I’m a sucker for anything that looks like it might fit into my preferred genre. You know, “Waterworld”, “The Postman” and more recently, “The Road”… None of these were great but they were entertaining and worth the price of admission. I’ll even admit that “Waterworld” made it into my DVD collection and lets face it, it was a DUD!

   Now that you have a better understanding of where my survival movie tastes run, I’ll tell you exactly what I thought of “The Grey”… It sucked! You know the full 2 thumbs down kind of sucked! Mrs. Prepper went with me and she felt even stronger about its suckiness than I did…

   Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t misjudge the films potential… It just fell flat on its face! It was set in theAlaskawilderness with Liam Neeson playing a hunter/bodyguard for one of the big oil companies out ofPrudhoe Bay. His job was to keep wolves from attacking the oil workers when they were out working in the more remote areas of the already vast remoteness! Well, as the story unfolds we find our main character doing his job and successfully taking down a large wolf just a mere few feet from some distracted workers. I wish I could tell everyone what kind of gun he used but it all happened so fast that I really didn’t get a good look, sorry! The feel of the character is that of a mercenary hunter, Liam is just enough grizzled to pull the part off or could have with a better storyline to work with.

   The plot quickly turns to a group of oil workers, Liam included, getting on a plane bound for somewhere, I’m pretty sure it didn’t say but back to civilization of some sort. Well of course in a disaster movie the plane has to go down in the middle of nowhere. The short story on this is that the plane goes down in the middle of a blizzard and they mentioned the temperature at negative some such but Liam and a hand full of survivors are running around in a relatively small amount of clothing attempting to save as many folks as possible. Lots of time is wasted on such things as picking through pockets to save dead guys wallets for their families and even saying a few words over the dead… All fine and good except they would have all perished in short order from exposure, long before they had the opportunity to discuss the morality of stealing cash off of dead people, which of course happens and helped me decide how badly this film sucked!

   I can hear you all now… “Preppers just being all pissy, nitpicking the crap out of a relatively decent adventure film!” Nope, not this time it’s actually that bad. Shortly after the plane goes down the survivors discover that they aren’t the only living things in the area… What do you think they discover? I’ll give you 2 guesses – that’s right wolves! Now it isn’t that I dispute there could have been wolves out there, there probably could have been but not these wolves… These were the kind whose backs come up to a mans shoulder, you know the very realistic kind! Glowing eyes and everything, I mean come on… glowing eyes on GIANT wolves that actually are coordinating evil plots to kill the survivors. On several occasions the wolves killed the men, just to kill them, not eat them like the meat we actually are.

   I have heard the stories of wolves that will act aggressively toward men but not like this and I haven’t heard about wolves conducting pleasure killings like a pack of neighborhood dogs might but I digress! The plot follows the men as they move from one “lets break for the trees” then everyone would run through the thigh deep snow to stay ahead of the already nearly on them wolves.

   Since this is actually turning into more of rant against this movie then a fair minded critique… I’ll point out another ponderous moment. Before the men gather everything they can carry from the wrecked plane, which isn’t much, we see Liam find his hunting rifle. Of course the gun is damaged and he discards it but we see him bend down and pick up his ammunition case. That’s all fine and good but it’s clearly rifle ammunition, a short while later Liam hands out shotgun shells to make improvised weapons to use against the wolves… It’s just stuff like that that makes the movie go from just being not very good to bad and then to sucks…

   Another thing that was just over the top was the foul language. I can already hear some of you now… “Preppers a prude and is easily offended,” this however is not the case in the least. I wish I could claim to always have the cleanest mouth but fall short on many occasions in this area. This movie is about crass oil workers and I really wanted to defend the true to life portrayal of how those particular blue collar workers MIGHT actually speak but no, this movie would have even the worst of them blushing. It really was that gratuitous, not necessarily something that would push it to “sucks” category but it sure didn’t help!

   The movie is almost 2 hours long, which is normally something I like but this dark plot just didn’t need to be that long. It starts out alright but everything from character development to story line falls flat. I wish that I could find something redeeming to say about the film but in my opinion, there isn’t anything nice to say!

   I’ve tried to leave enough surprises as not to completely ruin the experience for the hopefully few of you that decide to spend your hard earn cash on this piece of cutting room floor trash. If anyone does go see this, or possibly already has seen it, I welcome your thoughts in the comments section. I doubt there will be many that will stick up for this though. All I can say is “poor Liam”, this won’t do anything to help his career!

Submitted for your consideration!

Prepper

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