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Liam Neeson in The Grey

Just call Liam Neeson the January Man.

The Liam Neeson thriller — like the demonic possession horror movie — has become something of a January mainstay, with Neeson vehicles Taken (2008) and last year’s Unknown (2011) brightening up what’s otherwise widely considered the worst of all movie months.

Now have Neeson in The Grey, which as a change of pace is an example of the wilderness survival subgenre, which also includes The Edge (1997). Whereas that film featured a killer grizzly, this one offers an almost supernaturally malevolent wolfpack, in effect throwing smatterings of horror in for heightened effect.

Also part of the mix, however — and certainly a bonus for this kind of movie — is an unexpected measure of thoughtfulness, even philosophy. The Grey isn’t a great film, but it’s an effective movie of its type, with a certain depth and texture that keeps it from being easily forgotten.

Ottway (Neeson) is a man with an unconventional job: he’s a crack shot hired to protect oil workers in Alaska from predatory wolves. It’s not his preferred occupation, to be sure, putting him in the company of "men unfit for mankind." Flashbacks and voiceovers reveal a broken former romance, leaving him nothing to return to civilization for anyhow. He flirts with suicidal thoughts.

When the plane carrying he and the other men goes down in a violent storm of light and noise, his survival instincts emerge — and he becomes the default leader of the other survivors, none of whom have the knowledge to make it out of the wilderness. Even Ottway, however, may not be able to save them from the pack of wolves that begins to stalk them.

What’s most potent about The Grey is its harrowing tone and atmosphere: the hostile Alaskan landscape is appropriately stark and threatening, and we can feel the cold in our own bones as the characters trudge through wind, snow and ice. As with any good outdoor survival thriller, we’re also made painfully aware of the variety and speed with which the environment can kill a person.

(There’s also brilliant use of the snowbound setting in one scene, wherein the wolves attack a man who’s fallen behind — and the others, doubling back with painful slowness in the knee-high drifts, have to watch helplessly, just out of reach. One can imagine Hitchcock viewing in approval.)

The overall effect a visceral one: the rawness of feel and place is reminiscent of Andrei Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train (1985), also set in the brutal Alaskan back country. Enhancing the effect is the grainy digital cinematography, which suits the material.

Also as with Konchalovsky’s film, director Joe Carnahan (who previously teamed with Neeson on 2010’s The A-Team) injects what could be considered a degree of poetry. Dialogue such as "I move like I imagine the damned do" feels a wee bit forced, perhaps, but there’s a surprisingly poignant moment late in the film, in which one character declares, "I just had the clearest thought." You should see the entire scene for itself, which plays with sad, quiet beauty.

So perhaps The Grey should really be classified as an existentialist outdoor survival thriller, with horror elements. It’s not, finally, about whether Neeson or anyone else escapes from the ends of the Earth, but how well they face the test of the experience they’ve been thrust into. It’s an idea that’s been done better, true (as in the case of Runaway Train), but it’s nonetheless done here with reasonable aplomb.