15 Most Underrated Movies Of The Decade (So Far)

9. The Grey

"Liam Neeson fights wolves" is such an overwhelmingly awesome movie pitch it's likely The Grey was greenlit on that sentence alone, with the film's many distributors not even bothering to read the script.

That'd somewhat explain the marketing for the film, which hinged heavily on how this was essentially Taken, but with wild canines instead of Eastern europeans. You see, while The Grey does indeed feature a post-Taken Neeson and wolves, the two don't ever come together on screen; Neeson's John 'Bryan Mills' Ottway is being stalked across Alaska by grays for most of the run-time, but the film cuts before he gets to try out his smashed glass gloves on the alpha of the pack. Instead, Joe Carnahan's film is a meditation on machismo, more interested in survival in places even Bear Grills would find extreme and the the gradual wearing down of Ottway.

As you can imagine, this didn't sit too well with audiences wanting a non-stop thrill ride like the rest of Neeson's recent output. But if you can get past the false advertising, there's an awful lot in The Grey, with a climactic, God-challenging scene seeing the actor at his best since Schindler's List. Tracing his filmography that's less of a claim than it first seems, but it is still pretty damn good.