The Grey

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.

Sit through the entire credits. There’s one more shot still to come. Not that you wouldn’t be content without it.

The gristle inside this movie is one of the things that save it from being simply a series of challenges.

A terrifically exciting, deeply unsettling survivalist epic.

The setting and fatalistic musings of The Grey invite comparison to Sean Penn’s stirring 2007 ad­ven­ture “Into the Wild”; in its more metaphysical moments, told in impressionistic flashbacks, it recalls last year’s “The Tree of Life.”

Mr. Carnahan has till now been pigeonholed, and rightly, by comedy shoot-’em-ups like “Smokin’ Aces” and “The A-Team.” But here he is with The Grey – certainly an adventure film but one with a spiritual ingredient that is both surprising and fiercely resonant.

The Grey, whose clipped title, grim swagger, and lost-in-the-outback themes conjure up visions of that Alec Baldwin/Anthony Hopkins classic, “The Edge,” devolves into a predictable man-against-nature, and man-against-fellow man, affair.

You see the pattern here? Winter-release slot + travel budget + Liam Neeson = slightly preposterous, routinely violent, apparently lucrative action movie in which the Irish-born star signals inner emotional conflict with his handsomely mashed boxer’s face while settling outer physical conflict with his boxer’s fists.

It’s cheap the way The Grey wants to be both a Liam Neeson “Quit Taking My Stuff” movie and an existential thriller about survival.

The picture’s dialogue-heavy stretches and ambiguous finale could leave ticketbuyers impatient for less chatter and more chomping.