Liam Neeson seems to have taken a liking to the action thriller genre of late, following his surprise hit Taken with leading roles in a number of actioners, including Clash of the Titans, The A-Team, and the upcoming Unknown White Male. Add to that list The Grey, a survival drama that would reunite the 58-year-old actor with Titans director Joe Carnahan in a film that sounds like an unlikely cross between Armageddon, Into the Wild, and Disney’s Snow Dogs gone horribly awry.
Heat Vision reports that Neeson is currently negotiating to join the thriller, the story of a man (Neeson) and his oil drilling team who survive a plane crash in Alaska, and must struggle to survive in the wilderness. The situation escalates when the men discover they have intruded upon the territory of a pack of large, unnaturally aggressive wolves with a taste for human meat. Carnahan wrote the survival drama with newcomer Ian Jeffers, the screenwriter who wrote the original short story The Grey is based on. Scott Free is on board to produce with financing from Inferno Entertainment.
Neeson would replace another A-Team actor, Bradley Cooper, who was originally set to headline The Grey when it was first announced at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. While it may seem odd to some that Neeson has been set to fill the shoes of an actor 23 years his junior, the grizzled Taken star actually strikes me as a much more adept wolf-killer than Cooper, who is far too pretty to be taken seriously as the leader of a wolf-averse oil drilling team. Have you seen Taken? I almost feel sorry for those wolves.
Source: Heat Vision
