The Grey

Running time: 117 minutes

Rated: R (language, violence, and disturbing content, including bloody images resulting from a plane crash and animatronic wolves)

The titles of Liam Neeson’s recent solo vehicles - “Taken,’’ “Unknown,’’ and now “The Grey’’ - have been as economical as his acting in them. They’re variations on the same idea. He’s on his own. He wants back what has been stolen from him: respectively, his daughter, his identity, his marriage. The last one should explain what we and Neeson are up against in “The Grey.’’ It’s the most philosophical of these movies. It’s also the most ambiguous.

Neeson is John Ottway, a sharpshooter doing security work at an Alaskan oil refinery. He’s broken up about his wife (Anne Openshaw), who, in sunny flashbacks, lies beside him in bed. (Is she the late Mrs. Ottway? The former? Oh, the greyness of it all!) Whatever’s happened has turned him suicidal with heartsickness. We’ve known this man 10 minutes and already he’s putting his mouth around the barrel of a rifle. He manages to push on, boarding a flight from the refinery, along with some of the crew, to some place presumably happier. They never make it. The plane crashes. Seven men survive only to be gradually picked off by freezing cold and wolves, which, we’re told, are the only animals that seek revenge.

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. We’ve come, in vain, to see him danse-macabre with wolves, and the film’s director, Joe Carnahan, provides the occasional horror-film sneak attack. He also manages to create one of the movies’ more nightmarish plane crashes and conclude with just the sort of ludicrous finale that paying customers who’ve seen the ads might assume they would be getting a whole film of. It’s been 15 years since we fell for a similar trick when “The Edge’’ invited us to watch Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin go nose to nose with a bear. What we got was alpha-male opera from David Mamet.