Liam Neeson plays Ottway, an Irish gun-for-hire who is employed by an oil company to shoot the wolves that live near the oil drilling operation in northern Alaska. He's upset that he's lost his wife months before and is about to shoot himself in the face (happy story!), when he decides not to, but rather to to fly home instead. That ill-fated flight then crashes leaving only seven men alive (including Dermot Mulroney and Dallas Roberts). They soon realize that a pack of wolves is hunting them so they have to move from the wreckage to have a chance at not being eaten. As the trek along the Alaskan backwoods their odds get slimmer as they realize they are very well outnumbered by the animals.
This is a fun movie, though not a particularly brilliant one. It certainly plays some of the Val Lewton games where you hear noises but don't know if they're wind or wolf howls. It's all very unsettling and a bit eerie, even though there's nothing really magical about the wolves... they're just hungry.
I always appreciate a movie with a good elliptical ending, and this has one. It's a bleak story that is told efficiently, if sentimentally (I really don't care about Ottway's back-story; when we find out what it is, it doesn't change anything because he's still being hunted by wild animals), and has a cool look to it with lots of sequences set at night and in blizzard conditions. Writer/director Joe Carnahan has done better work in the past (like Narc, which is great), but this is still solid and fun.
Stars: 2.5 of 4
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