Liam Neeson out in the wild (Open Road FIlms)

A desperate man slips while rappelling across a ravine, crashing through dozens of branches as he falls probably 100 feet to the ground. Lying broken on the snow, he suddenly sees his beloved daughter tickling his face with her hair. But he’s hallucinating. It’s actually a wolf eating his nose off.

It’s only January, but please remember this scene from Joe Carnahan’s laughable men-against-wolves yarn, The Grey, when it comes time to ticking off the year’s worst moments in film.

Director and co-writer Carnahan had probably hoped The Grey would be a survival tale with philosophical echoes in the mold of a Jack London or Stephen Crane story. But instead of real intellectual drama on the hostility of nature, we get sub-dorm room campfire chats about religion; and instead of a believable struggle to survive, we get monster CGI wolves.

You can see he had a germ of a good idea, though, and it begins well enough. In the rather thrilling opening, a plane full of oil field workers goes down in some snow-covered Alaskan nowhere. This is one of the rare moments in the film where special effects serve the storytelling, and it’s brilliantly done, with the layers of metal of the plane peeling back and the hapless passengers slammed by the onrush of air, even if it does makes the unfortunate mistake of reminding you rather strongly of the far superior Alive (a reminder hammered home later by a character who jokes that the survivors are like the “people in that movie who had to eat each other.”)

Fate acting like a casting manager of The Real World, those still living are a conveniently selected bunch sure to represent all possible audience demographics and to generate the maximum amount of conflict: the sensitive guy (Dallas Roberts), the squirrely guy (Joe Anderson), the family man (Dermot Mulroney), the black guy (Nonso Anozie), the Hispanic guy (Ben Bray), and the brutal ex-con (Frank Grillo), who jockeys for dominance of the bunch (the parallels with a wolf pack are pretty explicit). And in a misguided attempt to “humanize” the soon-to-be wild animal chow, each man has at least one scene to mug and talk about his background and pull out some photos from his wallet.

Did I say wild animal chow? Unluckily for this gang, shortly after emerging from the wreckage of their plane, they discover some angry wolves feeding on their dead friends. Shortly after that, the wolves start attacking the survivors. So they make a mad rush for the forest, where they hope to escape the beasts and wait out a rescue or maybe find help on their own. It’s a tall order, but luckily for this crew, among them is Ottway, conveniently a professional wolf hunter, played by Liam Neeson.

Neeson is fully in the “bad ass” phase of his career, and he essentially plays the same character he did in Taken, except instead of fighting Albanian sex traffickers he’s outsmarting wolves. He’s a combination of Jason Bourne, MacGyver, and the Crocodile Hunter, and also possesses that masterly omniscience only granted to people by bad screenwriters, such as when, after killing a lone wolf that surprise-attacks the men’s camp, he impossibly determines it was the “omega male, the outcast,” sent to test their mettle. Of course, Ottway is humanized a bit: he has a personal tragedy in his background, slowly revealed as the film jogs along.

And the wolves! When I told a friend about this movie, he worried that it would roll back all of the gains made in rehabilitating their image since Never Cry Wolf. It’s true, many people in the country still really hate wolves, blaming them for decimating game populations and poaching livestock. You can even find websites giving instructions on how to leave poisoned bait for the animals, and buy posters, such as my favorite, one of a wolf in crosshairs, with the charming slogan “Smoke a Pack a Day.” And here, wolf haters might seem to have a film that halfway vindicates their hatred. But I think the danger of a backlash is slight. Even the biggest wolf hater in Montana would have to admit the enormous, badly computer-rendered animals in this movie are so ridiculously malevolent, such pure engines of relentless slaughter, that they have more in common with the villains of a made-for-ScyFy creature feature like Boa vs. Python than any actual wildlife.