Liam Neeson goes toe to toe with some lupine enemies in Joe Carnahan's latest
Narc director
Joe Carnahan didn’t please everyone with his take on The A-Team (we liked it) and heads for more intimate and mature territory with a thriller set in the isolated wastes of Alaska.
Liam Neeson (replacing
Bradley Cooper, thank little baby Jesus – the guy is a dramatic dud!) stars as the leader of a group of oil drillers who crash land in the middle of nowhere and have to survive against a pack of unusually aggressive wolves.
While it may sound hopelessly generic, a fantastic promo trailer which filtered out onto the net a few months showed Carnahan’s subjective take on the material, lingering on Neeson’s need to get back to his wife and his own internal monologue as he faces off against the fierce adversaries.
We love the intertitles and the flashbacks to Neeson’s family life, with the fractured images bearing more than a passing resemblance to scenes from Carnahan’s superlative
Narc, which people still don’t talk about nearly enough. Those wolf shots look ocaisionally ropey here but we’re in no doubt they’ll be ship shape (and perhaps CG enhanced) by the time the film arrives in late January.
It’s looking like a serious slice of survival horror with a fantastic leading man and some seriously nasty action. Plus, who doesn’t want to see Neeson go toe to toe with a wolf, armed only with some broken glass strapped to his knuckles?
Check out the rather more generic trailer and see The Grey in cinemas from the 27th of January.