Last night my wife and I sat down to watch The Grey, a plane crash thriller starring the usually excellent Liam Neeson, looking forward in the midst of our Texas heat wave to a tale told in Alaska midwinter; but alas, it was not to be. Neeson is fine, just the kind of pugnacious but thoughtful leader needed by a gang of roustabouts whose plane has just crashed in the wilderness. Effects were great, wolves scary, but what caused us to hit the Off button was the unremitting torrent of f--- words and m----f---- words and s---: repeat with feeling, over and over again. Essentially, they had vocabularies of three words each, linked by conjunctions, rendering even the bright ones imbeciles. No prude I, but honestly. It made me nostalgic for the spruced-up talk of 1950s movies. The Grey would have been a much better film if it had been made in buttoned-up, repressed 1959.
