A film review by Craig J. Koban July 28, 2022

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

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.