Movie: The Grey
Drink: mini bottles of Pinot Noir
It started out with such promise. An intriguing back story about Liam Neeson's struggle to deal with some hot chick leaving him and he being up here on this northern oil rig with a bunch of roughnecks. Artsy close-ups of his strangely perfect nose as he writes a heart felt letter among the numb frozen tundra. A failed suicide attempt.
You know the scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail movie where the writer has a heart attack and then dies and the story changes? Well I'm assuming that's what happened twenty minutes into this one.
As soon as the roughnecks board the plane home, the movie takes a nose dive, much like the plane, the plot, and my buzz were about to do. The dropping of F-bombs became so prolific that I actually broke one of my movie rules and pulled out my cell phone and started timing the seconds between swear words. I soon found that it was impossible to be resetting my timer that fast , so I switched to recording times between f words. I never got above 42 seconds. I swear; no pun intended.
After the callouses formed over the modesty portions of my brain, I sat back and tried to just get into the plot, but I had an easier time finding the bottom of my popcorn bucket. Time for a refill.
"Can I get a f***in' refill?" I asked the snack counter girl. She knew what movie I was watching, so she understood.
Back in my seat I was subjected to dialogue and characters that made me cringe. Imagine the most annoying A-holes you have ever met and now imagine they have frostbite and are crabby and you have to hike in the snow with them and they won't stop dropping F-bombs into your deathstar and your brain blows up over and over and over and Chewbacca, er, I mean wolves are surrounding you and why the heck haven't they invented a way to get butter on ALL the popcorn?! Am I just supposed to eat the top and throw the rest in the aisle? Because that's what I did!
I digress.
The wolves looked stupid. CGI wolves are always going to look stupid. I mean, would it be THAT hard to train some huskies to growl at swearing, unlikable idiots? You probably wouldn't even have to train them.
In closing, I think this movie was born out of Liam Neeson's need for some extra cash, and the producer of Twilight's need to recoup some of the cash he spent on the lame CGI wolf program he paid for. Yes, they were that lame. I was expecting one of the wolves to stop chewing on one of the roughnecks and explode into an Abercrombie and Fitch model sporting jean shorts and a spray tan.
Exactly one hour and 8 minutes in, I walked out. I realized it was time to go when I was cheering every time a wolf took out another douche bag. Maybe it got better in the second half. I dare you to find out.
GO WOLVES!
