“The Grey” continues what has become a welcome seasonal movie tradition. For the past three winters, just when the Oscar nominees you’ve missed are trying to dazzle and guilt-trip you with visions of Importance, a lean and angry Liam Neeson shows up at the multiplex, out for righteous payback or at least the paycheck that no one would dare begrudge him. Buy a ticket, punk! Having paid his quality biopic dues as Oskar Schindler, Michael Collins and Alfred Kinsey, Mr. Neeson has, at least for now, turned to the rougher and perhaps more lucrative work of action heroism. It takes nothing away from his earlier achievements to note that he’s really good at it. He conveys a ferocious and absolute seriousness even when the going gets silly, and he finds the soul in each new angry-everyman cipher he is asked to play. 
 
 In “Taken” and “Unknown,” he explored the genre in its fast-moving, super-twisty cosmopolitan thriller mode. Those were glib entertainments improved by their star’s natural gravity. “The Grey,” directed by Joe Carnahan from a script he wrote with Ian Mackenzie Jeffers (based on Mr. Jeffers’s story “Ghost Walker”), is something else entirely: a stripped-down, elemental tale of survival in brutal circumstances, as blunt and effective — and also, at times, as lyrical — as a tale by Jack London or Ernest Hemingway. It’s a fine, tough little movie, technically assured and brutally efficient, with a simple story that ventures into some profound existential territory without making a big fuss about it. 
 
 The geographical territory the film stakes out is a bleak, frozen and harshly beautiful corner of Alaska, where Mr. Neeson and a bunch of other excellent actors are stranded after surviving a plane crash. Mr. Neeson’s character, Ottway, is part of a tribe of brawlers, drinkers and lost souls who work in the Arctic oil fields. His job is to roam the tundra with a high-powered rifle, “a salaried killer for a petroleum company,” picking off the predatory animals that menace the other workers. Ottway doesn’t say much, and we know nothing of his background other than that he once had a wife (played in flashbacks by Anne Openshaw). His melancholy voice-over narration early on is a letter to her. 
 
 The sentiments he expresses there hint at a core of tenderness behind his gruff, hangdog demeanor. It is clear that he is a man of violence with a keen, ruthless survival instinct, but also that he harbors deep reservoirs of sorrow and compassion. Shortly after the crash, tending to a badly injured passenger who clearly won’t make it, he eases the man’s passing with breathtaking gentleness. 
 
 That is not a phrase you would ordinarily associate with Mr. Carnahan, whose directing résumé includes exquisite delicacies like “Smokin’ Aces” and “The A-Team.” The sadistic, macho bluster of those movies seemed, at best, a gesture of mock rebellion, something to make football fans and beer drinkers feel like warriors. Such extreme, noisy fantasies of embattled pseudo-manhood might work as parody if they showed any genuine wit. 
 
 But “The Grey” unfolds in a mood of grim earnestness and is grounded in an idea of masculinity under duress that is no less authentic for being thoroughly sentimental. The survivors are all guys, every one possessing his own special blend of insecurity, bravado, courage and stupidity. They are bundled up in parkas, their faces obscured by stubble, snow and blood, so their personalities emerge through action and interaction. 
 
 Some live, some die, and rather than divulge their fates, I’ll list the names of the hardy souls who trudge off into the woods with Ottway: Burke (Nonso Anozie), Henrick (Dallas Roberts), Talget (Dermot Mulroney) and Diaz (Frank Grillo). One is a cynical ex-con, another a God-fearing father, but Mr. Carnahan doesn’t overplay their differences or push the actors — all excellent — toward caricature. He respects their individuality and the specific life-or-death predicament each must face. 
 
 Pursued by wolves, the men start to replicate the pack behavior of their predators. At one point, just out of sight, they hear howls and yelps that Ottway explains are the sounds of the alpha putting down a challenge to its authority. A few minutes later he does the same thing, dealing with someone foolish enough to question his wisdom and instincts. 
 
 Not that Ottway is in control of the situation. It is hard, in this cozy, wired-up, GPS world, to imagine circumstances in which human beings would be so completely at the mercy of nature, but Mr. Carnahan constructs a persuasive picture of primal danger. The wolves (designed by Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger) are an unremittingly, unromantically hostile presence, in part because the world into which Ottway and the others have tumbled belongs so completely to them. Their imperative is to hunt, eat and finally destroy the intruders, and every other natural force, from gravity to the weather to blind chance, seems to be on their side. 
 
 Which means that much of “The Grey” is devoted to the practical details of problem-solving: building fires, improvising weapons, securing food, keeping watch. Such details are the building blocks of suspense and also the scaffolding for the big themes that hover in the wintry air. 
 
 Action movies, including Mr. Carnahan’s earlier films, often turn death into sport, numbing pain, fear and desolation with the visceral rush of violence. “The Grey,” meticulous in its choreography of fight and flight, and questionable in its depiction of wolf behavior, is notable for the thoughtfulness and sensitivity with which it addresses the thorny ethical and metaphysical matters of mortality. It takes death seriously, and partly as a consequence, every moment, every frame, feels alive. 
 
 “The Grey” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Nature red in tooth and claw; men cursing a blue streak. 
 
 The Grey 
 
 Opens on Friday nationwide. 
 
 Directed by Joe Carnahan; written by Mr. Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, based on Mr. Jeffers’s short story “Ghost Walker”; director of photography, Masanobu Takayanagi; edited by Roger Barton and Jason Hellman; music by Marc Streitenfeld; production design by John Willett; produced by Jules Daly, Mr. Carnahan, Ridley Scott and Mickey Liddell; released by Open Road Films. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. 
 
 WITH: Liam Neeson (Ottway), Frank Grillo (Diaz), Dermot Mulroney (Talget), Dallas Roberts (Henrick), Joe Anderson (Flannery), Nonso Anozie (Burke), Ben Bray (Hernandez), James Badge Dale (Lewenden) and Anne Openshaw (Ottway’s wife). ||||| Kimberley French Liam Neeson goes from being the hunted to being the hunter in ‘The Grey.' 
 
 Those rabid eyes, that snarling face barely concealing a glimpse of tooth as he stalks with a coiled intensity. Anything can happen if he springs. 
 
 A wild wolf? No — Liam Neeson, a guy even wolves should be scared of in the gripping thriller “The Grey.” With a bellyful of lite Hemingway – most of the film’s do-or-die decisions are followed by serene acceptance of rugged death – and a heavy soul that never drags it down, director Joe Carnahan’s great adventure follows Neeson’s lead and stays steely to the end, even as its grizzled winners take nothing. 
 
 Neeson’s sharpshooter, John Ottway, works for an Alaskan refinery, shooting animals that threaten the oil rig workers. En route to a job, a rickety plane carrying Ottway and what he calls a standard crew (criminals, ex-cons, “the a—holes of the world”) crashes in the wilderness. The handful of wounded men must quickly figure out how to survive. 
 
 Each hour that gets harder. Building fires and finding food is tough enough. Fighting off packs of white wolves is the real threat, as well as snowstorms, a miles-high gorge and fights that could tear them apart before they can cross a river into the trees, and get closer, they hope, to civilization. 
 
 Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers’ screenplay, based on Jeffers’ novel, has some of the same man-vs.-nature elements as “Flight of the Phoenix,” “The Edge,” “Alive,” “The Way Back” and Jon Krakauer’s book “Into Thin Air.” It is, in the best sense, like a men’s adventure magazine splashed on the big screen. 
 
 In addition to a sturdy crew of supporting actors, including good turns from Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts and Frank Grillo, there are also haunting snippets of Ottway’s lost love, memories of an emotionally distant father and shouted challenges to any almighty force. (“Fine, I’ll do it myself,” Ottway mutters when no miracles arrive to save him.) The gristle inside this movie is one of the things that save it from being simply a series of challenges. 
 
 Neeson is perfect for this stuff. There have been high points among his “paycheck roles” over the last few years, yet it’s seemed, to an outsider, like he may have been escaping into big-budget work as a way of coping with his own personal tragedy, the death of wife Natasha Richardson in 2009. 
 
 We’ll never know, of course, but if that is the case, here’s hoping that “The Grey,” with its dark themes and gut-level grappling of courage and loss, helps bring him back where he belongs. ||||| The title "8 Million Ways to Die" was already taken, so "The Grey" had to settle for "The Grey," named for the plus-size wolves waging war on the desperate human survivors of an Alaskan wilderness plane crash. Tough situation. Frostbite. Wolf bite. Drowning. Falling from great heights. Harsh outcomes abound for both man and beast. 
 
 And yet the film takes some time to let its characters ruminate, by way of dialogue, on their circumstances, which gives "The Grey" a distinctly late-20th-century feel. The film stars Liam Neeson, a bona fide 59-year-old action hero, as an oil refinery sharpshooter charged with keeping predators at bay. Working from a short story by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, who wrote the script's first draft, co-writer and director Joe Carnahan places the formidable Neeson in the middle of a scary and bracing picture with more on its mind than advertised. Some of "The Grey" is phony, and it was a mistake to make the rogue wolves large enough to be mistaken for critters out of "Twilight." But Carnahan is smart enough to keep full-view images of the antagonists in check. And there's an actual human element to go with Carnahan's Jack London-inspired depiction of humans against the elements. 
 
 We meet Neeson's character, a heartbroken loner named John Ottway, on the verge of suicide and thinking back, obsessively, to the woman who got away. His demons temporarily quelled, Ottway boards a small plane with his fellow refinery workers and in one of the most nerve-racking flights ever put on film, the aircraft runs afoul of bad weather and crashes. (For a turbulence wimp like me, this scene was not easy.) 
 
 Eight survive, at first. Ottway, the alpha male, knows what he's doing. So does the alpha male of the wolf pack on their trail. The rest of the humans are played by an interesting ensemble of nonstars including Dermot Mulroney, Dallas Roberts, Nonso Anozie, Frank Grillo and others. The film shrewdly does not tip its hand about who's living and who's dying. 
 
 Carnahan indulges himself in ways most filmmakers would avoid: He gives several of the men, for example, extended soul-searching discussions about God's existence (or not), about owning up to one's fears, about the precarious nature of love. The best parts of "The Grey" connect the interior lives of these roughnecks with their newfound and lethal obstacles to safety. Carnahan made "Smokin' Aces" (which I hated) and"The A-Team"(which wasn't bad, actually); wisely, he shot and edited "The Grey" like neither of those pictures. This one's more relaxed in its rhythms, a brooding drama about a brooding man in a terrible situation. Only occasionally are there computer-generated ravines that must be leapt across; thankfully much of the action was shot in northern British Columbia, and a lot of the wind and snow and scenery is real. My favorite shot of Carnahan's is a close-up on Mulroney's face as he waits in line, behind Neeson, for a tricky ravine crossing. Most directors wouldn't care much about the supporting actor; they'd be too worried about fluffing up the lead's heroics. 
 
 Neeson holds it together from first to last. He is the rumbly voiced king of the late-January/early February action film, per "Taken" and"Unknown,"and by now moviegoers have been subliminally conditioned to pay money to hear that warm hearth of a speaking voice, under duress but coolly so, this time of year. Call "The Grey" "Deliverance" Lite, with snow, and wolves. And call it a solid January surprise. 
 
 mjphillips@tribune.com 
 
 'The Grey' -- 3 stars 
 
 MPAA rating: R (for violence/disturbing content including bloody images, and for pervasive language) 
 
 Running time: 1:57 
 
 Opens: Friday ||||| The computer-generated wolves have more personality than any of the dull characters in The Grey. 
 
 What starts as a tense and moody survival thriller fairly quickly becomes tedious, forced and far-fetched as a septet of men is preyed upon by a wolf pack in the Alaska wilderness. 
 
 Wolves are much maligned in literature and films. The Grey (* * stars out of four, R, opens Friday) takes the notion of their vicious natures to new extremes as dozens of hulking, bright-eyed beasts attack a ragtag assortment of plane-crash survivors with startling ferocity. When they're not ripping people to shreds — as seen up close and personal through an annoyingly shaky camera — they're lurking ominously nearby, howling and growling. 
 
 Liam Neeson stars as Ottway, a melancholy loner working among oil-rig roughnecks. Apparently, it's his job to keep the work site safe from animal attacks. When he's not shooting the furry denizens, he's obsessing over a letter he wrote to a woman he loved and lost. He spends a good portion of the movie rereading that letter. He has recurring dreams about his beloved lying in gauzy sheets, and he often recites the lines of a trite poem and consistently reaffirms his lack of religious faith. 
 
 Fresh moves are clearly not this guy's thing. 
 
 Subtlety is not a trait preferred by writer-director Joe Carnahan (The A Team), either. Early on, Neeson's Ottway sticks a shotgun in his mouth. Why he doesn't pull the trigger is left unexplained. 
 
 Next, he boards a small plane bound for Anchorage. Shortly after takeoff, turbulence rocks the plane and it crashes spectacularly in what looks like Arctic tundra. Bodies and plane parts are mangled and scattered across the icy landscape. Ottway takes charge, rounding up the half-dozen survivors and calming a dying man. 
 
 This all seems out of character for a guy who a few scenes earlier had seemingly lost the will to live. But he's still no match for the menacing wolves. 
 
 Suspense devolves into a rote tale of man vs. beast. The survivors don't fully capture our sympathies because no one is given much dimension. Verbal nastiness erupts occasionally between the humans, but most of their time is spent trudging through snowdrifts and getting into bloody tussles with wolves. 
 
 In a climactic scene, the wolf pack inexplicably stands patiently, waiting for Ottway to get ready, arm himself and take a few moments to recite a snippet of a hackneyed poem before they attack. It's as if they were instructed on the gentlemanly art of battle. 
 
 In every other scene, the wolves come off as more brutal than bears, sharks and anacondas combined. With its reliance on jolts, sudden movements and thunderous sounds, The Grey is more startling than frightening.
– The Grey, a survival-in-the-wilderness thriller starring Liam Neeson, is earning a wealth of literary comparisons. The film tells the story of a group of men stranded in the snow after a plane crash, and critics are mostly impressed. In the New York Times, AO Scott applauds the "fine, tough little movie, technically assured and brutally efficient, with a simple story that ventures into some profound existential territory without making a big fuss about it." The film is "as blunt and effective—and also, at times, as lyrical—as a tale by Jack London or Ernest Hemingway." The Grey is "in the best sense, like a men’s adventure magazine splashed on the big screen," notes Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. "With a bellyful of lite Hemingway and a heavy soul that never drags it down, director Joe Carnahan’s great adventure follows Neeson’s lead and stays steely to the end." But in USA Today, Claudia Puig isn't particularly wowed. "With its reliance on jolts, sudden movements, and thunderous sounds, The Grey is more startling than frightening," she writes. "What starts as a tense and moody survival thriller fairly quickly becomes tedious, forced, and far-fetched." "Some of The Grey is phony," agrees Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. But "there's an actual human element to go with Carnahan's Jack London-inspired depiction of humans against the elements." Click to see why Slate's Dana Stevens thinks the movie is "almost haiku-like."