THE GRAY MAN 2022, PG-13, 128 mins. Ryan Gosling as Court Gentry / Chris Evans as Lloyd Hansen / Ana de Armas as Dani Miranda / Jessica Henwick as Suzanne Brewer / Regé-Jean Page as Denny Carmichael / Wagner Moura as Laszlo Sosa / Julia Butters as Claire Fitzroy / Alfre Woodard as Margaret Cahill / Billy Bob Thornton as Donald Fitzroy Directed by the Russo Brothers / Written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, based on the book by Mark Greaney |
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ORIGINAL FILM A few things
plagued my brain while watching the new Netflix espionage action thriller
THE GRAY MAN: Firstly, how on
earth did this film cost upwards of $200 million to produce? That's not to say that it looks borderline amateurish at all,
but with this and last year's criminally putrid RED
NOTICE (also from Netflix) it has become clear the streaming giant
has endless cash to give filmmakers and actors to nab them away from
theatrical fare...and with no apparent qualitative checks and balances
system in place. Secondly, Netflix
could have been much more financially and creatively savvy and made ten
infinitely more compelling and ambitious minded genre films with the same
cast for the money they wasted on this. Again, THE GRAY MAN - based on the Mark Greaney 2009 novel of the same name - has top tier talent on board in terms of directors Anthony and Joe Russo (who previously and famously made the last few AVENGERS films and - for my money - one of the best MCU films period in CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER) as well as a crackerjack cast that features Steve Rogers himself in Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling as dueling super spies constantly trying to one up one another. You can definitely see the potential of Netflix and company here to make their own unique genre cocktail that's equal parts JOHN WICK, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, and JASON BOURNE and the film is not without some technical merit as a geographically epic globetrotting action thriller. The real problem,
though, with THE GRAY MAN is that it represents a genre effort on pure
autopilot and it seems made up from the regurgitated clichés and elements
from far too many better spy flicks that have come before it.
It's telling that this is financed and produced by the streaming
service, seeing as it evokes the vibe of an uninspired committee effort
that was haphazardly concocted to appease viewership algorithms.
Factoring this in with their other recent non-MCU effort in the
terribly undisciplined CHERRY (also made
for streaming, in its case Apple) and I'm starting to wonder if the Russos
were just awfully lucky and in the right place and right time with their
super hero film success. The screenplay here by frequent Russo collaborators in Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely is, at the best of times, a fairly lazy pastiche effort that wallows in some of the most overused conventions of spy fiction: We get good spy versus bad spy...check. We get good spy that once came from a dark and murky background on the opposite side of the law that's now recruited by the good guys to do their dirty work to stay his sentence...check. We get good spy facing multiple obstacles that begin to make him question his trust in those above him...check. We have a super sexy female spy thrown into this sausage fest narrative that becomes embroiled between both good and bad spy...check. We get a vulnerable child that's tossed in that's totally expendable to the bad spy, but needs saving and protecting by the good spy...check. We get rogue anti-heroes and other morally questionable government power brokers trying to pull all the strings...check. And, yes, we get a super sought after and super duper important thumb flash drive that contains vital INTEL that everyone wants...double check. How many more spy films am I going to have to endure that features agents on both sides of the ethical scales going toe-to-toe and destroying a lot of public property in the process to retrieve an incriminating drive? MacGuffins don't
get more perfunctory than this, let me tell you. As for the
so-called good guy spy with the murky past?
He's code named Sierra Six and is played in a charmless and stoic
performance by the usually committed Ryan Gosling.
As the film introduces him - set nearly twenty years in the past -
he's a down on his luck prisoner that's greeted by his future CIA handler
in Donald (Billy Bob Thorton), who gives him a juicy offer: become a top
secret black ops agent for Uncle Sam - which would involve the
assassinations of key targets - and his prison sentence will go bye-bye.
Six agrees, and then the film flashes forward 18 years (oddly, very
little is done to make Gosling look 18 years younger in the introductory
scene), and Six is now a lethal one man army force, but under a new
handler in Denny (Rege-Jean Page), who doesn't think too highly of
Donald's hand picked golden boy. Denny
sends Six on an assassination mission, which ends in failure, but leaves
Six in possession of that aforementioned thumb drive that has all sorts of
government secrets stored on it. Denny
soon marks Six for termination, which leads to him seeking out Donald for
help as well as new colleague on the field in Dani (Ana de Armas). Trouble for Six elevates when Denny activates Lloyd (Chris
Evans, sporting a douchey moustache and an even douchier attitude), a
shadow agent that uses highly questionable methods to complete his
assignments (that, and he's an itchy trigger fingered madman, when it
boils right down to it). Things
gets very complicated when Donald's own
teen daughter gets used as leverage by Lloyd to force him to assist him
with finding and exterminating Six. THE GRAY MAN has
a few pretty competently handled action set pieces, not to mention that it
gets good visual mileage out of its varied locales across multiple
countries. There's one
relatively clever action beat that takes place on massive cargo plane that
starts to lose its engines and comes crashing down to the ground, leaving
Six desperately trying to find a way to fend off multiple adversaries
while securing a much needed parachute (I don't think it's as spectacular
as a similar bonkers sequence in UNCHARTED,
but it certainly gets the job done).
There are also a couple more memorable action scenes, like one
involving a major attack in an eastern European town and a fairly
elongated one on board a careening train.
This should all be within the Russos' comfort window as far as
their skillset goes having previously orchestrated some of the epic super
hero mayhem of the MCU, but they surprisingly make some categorical
blunders along the way, like using murkily lit cinematography from Stephen
F. Windon that makes a lot of the film's scenes sometimes hard to watch.
That, and the Russos take an unfortunate page out of Michael Bay's
recent playbook with AMBULANCE by using
a lot of dizzying drone camerawork that adds less visual dynamism than
they think here (more often that not, it's just distractingly showy as
opposed to being exhilarating). There's
also some iffy and confusing editing on display that fails to make spatial
relationships clear as well as some beyond-obvious usage of CG assets that
has the unintended side effect of taking viewers out of the scenes in
question. THE GRAY MAN aims
for down to earth grittiness, but sometimes feels artificially rendered,
like a bad video game cut scene. This movie also
begs for a hard R-rating, but instead we get a rather soft pedaled PG-13,
which means that blood spewing is curiously absent when characters are
being constantly stabbed and sliced (it's odd, because the Russos
obviously don't have to worry about box office numbers and an audience
friendly rating: THE GRAY MAN is, more or less, an exclusive streaming
film, so why not push towards the extremes of the genre?).
As the film progressed more deeply into its convoluted narrative it
became quite apparent that many of its characters are hilariously
impervious to...well...death. It's
ironic that the Russos made two CAPTAIN AMERICA movies (and, to their
credit, the hero's two best solo entries), because the more human heroes
and villains here seem to be more indestructible than even the super
soldier jacked up Cap himself. Gosling's
Six is shot, stabbed, kicked, punched, dropped out of airplanes, dropped
several meters down onto hard concrete floors, and is still somehow able
to walk under his own power and unavoidably have a mano-a-mano climatic
showdown with the equally hard to murder Lloyd.
When characters like this are so over powered that they should have
been running around in spandex and capes then you know this kind of spy
film is in trouble when it comes to dramatic stakes.
Equally amusing is how these characters leave so much collateral
damage in their wake in many places that are visible to the public, making
them the worst kind of clandestine agents that seem to forget the word secret
in their job titles. There's other
grating issues at play with THE GRAY MAN as well, such as having a child
being thrown in for endangerment purposes (she becomes more of a plot
device than a fully realized, flesh and blood character).
Also, for a film that involves some truly dreary subject matter
beyond child endangerment (like the grueling torture of captives and the
killing of a lot of innocent civilians), THE GRAY MAN seems to (sorry for
the constant correlations here) go the MCU route by making their
characters atypically quippy at the wrong and most opportune times.
It really cleanses away any authentic grime that I think this film
was trying to attain. Perhaps
more damaging is that Gosling - one of his generation's greatest
performers - is kind of a charisma black hole as Six and not entirely
worthy of hero worship in the story.
Developing a rooting interest in this protagonist is hard because
Six doesn't possess much of a defining personality; he's disappointingly
vanilla. Evans, on the polar
opposite spectrum, goes full-on over the top as his blunt force instrument
of chaos. It's nice to see
Evans take roles that are diametrically opposed to his more famous
nice-guy comic book crusader of justice beforehand, but he's so hammy and
so desperate to scenery chew here that Lloyd becomes hard to take
seriously as a vile threat. And
poor Ana de Armas (who was so sensationally winning in a largely
underwritten role as a super spy in the
last James Bond film) isn't given much to do here sandwiched
between he two male stars. |
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