After reviewing some very fine, blue plate special Oscar worthy films: “Descendants,'” “The Help,” ” The Artist,” I felt ravenous for a good cheeseburger with fries movie. I needed to see people run, things blown up, etc. So I walked into Joe Carnahan’s (“A-Team”) new epic “The Grey,” expecting all of the above with extra onions. While I didn’t get filet mignon, I was very surprised at what I was given.

“The Grey” is all about a plane full of oil field roughnecks, tough and angry men, divorced wanderers, ex-cons hiding out in Alaska’s wilderness, who come crashing down in the vast emptiness of the North. The crash itself is one of the best, most frightening air disasters since “Castaway.”

It takes long minutes to come down and when it does, our hero, a guy named John Ottaway (Liam Neeson) is thrown clear along with a handful of others. The rest of the group are mangled and burned, thrown about with six sections of the plane.

This leaves us with six men being led out of the chaos by Alpha Liam. We learn, bit by bit, that he is a professional sniper hired to keep the Alaskan wolves off the oil sites.

The journey out will take the slowly diminishing group through a couple of frightening blizzards, treks through hip-deep snow and bungee jumping down the deepest CGI chasm ever filmed.

The pilgrims suffer the cold and the ice, deep snow, frostbite, bloody wounds and lack of food. Then we meet the wolves, not one of which is related to the cute wolf who befriended Kevin Costner in “Dancing With Wolves.” These boys travel in large packs, led by a couple of animatronic creatures right out of “The Wolf Man” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” Okay. They’re a bit much and give us a few giggles … for a while. Then we see them close up.

As the survivors bury the dead and gather around their fires, Ottaway (Neeson) starts to take charge. There is no vote here. He is an encyclopedia of survival techniques and quickly has their ear.

He explains the ways and wiles of wolves, and how he suspects the survivors are very close to their winter dens, which makes them extremely dangerous. The idea is to pack up and get off the ice, make for the trees.

Now we begin to see what Carnahan is trying to unfold for us. The wolves are sort of like the Indians in Robert Redford’s “Jeremiah Johnson,” protecting their turf and making runs at the humans under cover of darkness. The predators come at them suddenly, plucking one after another of human flesh.

“But they’re not eating him,” Ottaway explains after one of them is butchered. “They’re just coming to kill. We’re alien here, they’re threatened.”

Ottaway’s past is slipped in here and there in soft focus flashbacks. We can see that there was a love (Anne Openshaw) and that it ended badly, probably in divorce. He is seen penning a note in the opening scenes, and in one twilight snowy moment before the flight, he sits in a field and puts his weapon to his mouth. As he touches the trigger, a wolf in the distance howls. A bit of heavy-handed foreshadowing to be sure, but it stops him as if some presence lets him know that his fate isn’t going to be that easy.

After several sequences of watching the walks through the pines and birches and falling snow, all photographed in early evening blue light, brought back memories of Kobayashi’s “Kwaidan.” This proved to be true as the credits listed the cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi.

“The Grey” has its weak moments and won’t be mistaken as neo-Kurosawa,but Carnahan clearly has put his heart in it. This is no throwaway thriller. The deaths of each character are beautifully edged. The big man with soft eyes falls asleep into death dreaming of his baby sister. Another, who suffers a horrifying fall into a canyon, is visited by his tiny daughter who comes to kiss his bloodied face.

Much is being written and discussed about the ending. It will anger some, amuse others, but I found it to be perfect. There are no ribbons or bows on this package. The violence and brutality of men pitted again the elements and the creatures is often hard to watch.

There is fine acting here. Dermot Mulroney is surprisingly good. There is Frank Grillo as an ex-con and an almost unrecognizable James Badge Dale (“Shame” and “Rubicon”), and Dallas Roberts from “The Good Wife” and “Rubicon.”

Our central hero, Neeson, always a superior talent, has several moments, that in another year, would have gotten him Oscar notice. Neeson, has emerged as the new action hero. He’s welcome.

J.P. Devine is a former stage and screen actor.