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Originally Posted by stultiloquy It may not have made the movie any better, but you would at least get a clear resolution from a final fight, no matter the outcome. What I find to be the particularly glaring issue with the ending is that it felt severely misplaced to me, especially when you consider how absurd the rest of the movie is. The entire movie is about SPOILER: show these guys surviving ridiculous circumstances - (circumstances which should have surely killed them 15 minutes into the film), all the while fighting off poorly rendered CG wolves, jumping off cliffs and surviving, making working tightropes out of shirts to cross chasms, and they cap it off with Liam Neeson taping shooters to his fists. After all that they tack on a non-ending in an effort to induce a poignant cliffhanger, so they can try and get the audience to empathize with a character that's barely been developed. When your movie has spent the previous 115 minutes fully embracing it's preposterous premise, it might as well commit to it through the end, rather than turn pretentious for the finale. Like I said, it tried to take itself way more seriously than it should.

SPOILER: show

You get a very clear resolution to the film. I maintain that the ending is as perfect as it can get for this story. There is only one possible outcome to one man vs. a pack of wolves, and it isn't guy kills all wolves then a rescue helicopter flies over and everything is just dandy bars. The film ends with Ottway being done with running, making his stand, and knowing full well that he's done. But he's going out on his own terms. Not drowning in a river or falling off a cliff. Once more into the fray. That's the resolution, not something as pat as whether he gets rescued or not.

The main problem with The Grey was that it was marketed as Liam Neeson vs. Wolves, and that's not what it is at all. Just because the premise and some of the events of a film are preposterous, it doesn't mean the film itself was. There's not a lot of films that have genuinely realistic premises and characters. The characters are developed enough, it's just in a much more subtle way than most films. I didn't find any of them to be stock character like you might think you'd see in a film like this.