Caught a preview screening of this movie – snow was keeping the customers away so the theater announced it was free to everyone who could get to the box office. Against any kind of of reasonable judgement, we took a cab with no clear idea of how to get home. Let none question my devotion to seeing movies early.

You’ve likely seen the trailer for this, and you could be forgiven for thinking it’s basically ‘Taken’ with wolves instead of Albanians. The thing is, it’s not that. It’s spiritually much closer to London’s ‘To Build a Fire’, which is the kind of soulcrushingly heavy short story that can scar a 7th-grader for life. The plane crash from the trailer happens early in Act I. The wolves begin to menace the camp immediately. Neeson plays a man employed by the oil companies to shoot any wolves who come too close to the pipeline workers, and he uses that and his imposing 11-foot height to claim alpha status in the survivor group. He counsels movement, both to move out of wolf territory and to find their own help. The group follows, but with significant reservations.

Then, hope dies. Not just once, but over and over until you’re begging for mercy. With only the crudest improvised weapons and no real sense of their location, the men are sitting ducks. As in ‘To Build a Fire’, the real antagonist is Nature, both in the form of the wolves and in the shape of the brutalizing weather conditions. In what feels like real time, members of the group fall victim to the pack, to exposure, and to the increasingly poor decision making that comes from anoxia and resignation.

Liam Neeson does a great job of seeming focused, unsentimental and beyond the reach of fear and despair. Of course, that’s what he does now. He should probably be good at it, at least as good as Clint Eastwood is at squinting. The rest of the cast does yeoman’s work making you care about their underwritten characters. The wolves are good, too, when they’re not in closeup.

The real problem with the movie is that Joe Carnahan’s script lets in no air. The macho nihilism of the narrative is hard to take for 2 hours, and the film runs out of things to say somewhere in act II. The last 30 minutes require a little masochism to sit through, and any light that’s introduced is there only to be arbitrarily snuffed out.

‘The Grey’ does deserve credit in one major way. If this thing was focus-grouped at all, no one read the comment cards. There’s no way that act III is the result of public opinion. In this era of accountant-run studios that’s pretty refreshing.

We had to wander around in the snow for 20 minutes or so after the movie to find a cab driver with the guts to take us most of the way home. I would be lying if I said I didn’t have my eyes peeled a little. Lower Queen Anne appears to be free of Arctic wolves, in case you’re wondering.

I’d say watch it if Liam Neeson is your spirit animal, or if you like being punched in the face by hopelessness forever.