Answer: When you watched only the first 28 minutes. It's easier to write about only 28 minutes than about 118, but it's harder to write about the other 90.
That's the fix I find myself in when it comes to reviewing The Grey (2011, directed by Joe Carnahan). Maybe it's a guy's film. At any rate, my wife didn't want to watch any more than those first 28 minutes, after the airplane carrying Alaska oil workers went down in snow-covered mountains with only six survivors, not counting the seventh man we'd just watched bleed to death in his seat while the six look on, the Liam Neeson character holding the dying man's hand and telling him to imagine something he likes, everything's going to be okay.
But of course, you know it's not. Outside the riven airplane, Neeson next spies a passenger seat thrown under a tree with a stewardess in it and, thinking she might still be alive, reaches out a hand toward her. But what's that vague, grey shape behind her?
Whatever it is, it's big and quick and has sharp teeth. By the time the other survivors have come to Neeson's aid and driven the grey thing off, Neeson has a serious bleeding wound in his right thigh.
Can I recommend this film? Yes, but may I ? I think so. In fact, I feel confident enough about the film from its first 28 minutes that I think I should recommend it (if you're a guy or a tomgal, I guess I should qualify).
The film's opening minutes, before the oil workers board the airplane, are powerful, with frankly the best voice-over I've ever heard. I generally dislike voice-over, which is too often a cheap narrative technique used to replace scenes and dialogue that were too challenging or expensive to think of or produce. It's usually written as from narrator to viewer, and I don't care to be addressed in that way. But Neeson's words in this film are simply saying the words that you're finally shown he is writing to a woman whom he has loved and, for some reason not revealed—not yet, we hope—has lost and doesn't expect to get back. And Neeson delivers them perfectly, in a voice so private and understated you know it's his suffering soul that's talking. In fact, the Neeson character is suffering so much that he almost kills himself with his rifle rather than board the plane.
In the first minute or two Neeson refers to himself as a salaried killer, and I thought maybe this was another assassin movie. But it soon became clear that his job was to look out for wolves and bears that might attack workers and shoot them with his rifle. He is shown tenderly laying his hand on a dying wolf as the animal slowly dies—a close parallel to his comforting the dying worker on the airplane.
All this tells me that The Grey is a well-wrought film, and its makers take life and death seriously. This is much more than entertainment.
We watched the opening on DVD from our local library; I'll probably watch the rest via Netflix download (sometime when my wife is away).
I enjoyed the movie.
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