The Gray Man is a Netflix film directed by the Russo Brothers and a script by Joe Russo as well as a their Avengers writers Markus and McFeely and is based off of a novel and stars Ryan Gosling as Sierra Six which is part of a secret squad that exists in what is known as the Grey of the CIA but when his old mentor (Billy Bob Thornton) is kidnapped by a psychotic killer (Chris Evans) Six must come to his rescue while also finding a top secret hard drive and fending off plenty of assassins who want him dead.
The Gray Man is sadly a big big disappointment for me but before I delve into that I want to delve into the main thing I enjoyed in this movie and that is Ana De Armas who proved in No Time to Die last year that she could be a great action heroine and this time she does so once again and firstly she wears this amazing suit in her first scene that looks gorgeous and then she becomes a vital ally for Six in his mission and proves to be resourceful, able to kick bottom as well as be vulnerable and likeable as a heroine and it really adds a lot to this movie for me.
But outside of her this movie was a real letdown and it stung a little bit for me given that this was the team, the group of people that made those last 2 Avengers movies in Infinity War and Endgame that I really enjoyed and could’ve made for a great end to the MCU on the whole even though that was never going to happen but why did it disappoint well here is why.
- Firstly, the storytelling here is very unimaginative, most of it feels like there are very little stakes apart from a rescue mission and when you’ve had a movie or 2 to build up this relationship between Six and his mentor or Six having some adventures where he fought bad guys and saved the day as well as the world then this would’ve landed better for me but this time it didn’t.
And when you think about the James Bond or John Wick or Mission Impossible movies which this movie so desperately wants to be it just falls very very short in comparison as those films remember to build the attachment to their lead characters and place them in stories with real tangible stakes in them either to the world at large or their own personal world and that doesn’t happen here and it makes the film suffer.
- Secondly the action here is very poorly shot for the most part, now the Russo Brothers have shot good action scenes in the past be it the battles on Titan or Wakanda in Infinity War but here they look more the end battle in Endgame which looked very grey and murky and it was hard at times to see who was who and where was where and what was going on and also it felt very small like many of the other battles the Russos did in their MCU films.
And those battles often felt more like the actors standing on a green screen stage fighting each other with little to no impact and it shows here too and at times the soft backlighting to hide the green screen effect was very noticeable and bothersome as it pulls you out of the film and takes your focus away from the action going on on screen and I fear with so much content coming down the pipeline and only so many Visual Effects teams around to shoulder the workload that this is going to become a big big problem that I fear will get worse before it gets better.
- And lastly the characters here are kinda bland, Gosling more or less stares off into space with a blank stare which he is often doing in a lot of his films and makes for a boring hero in Six, Chris Evans who is often someone I enjoy watching is clearly wanting to channel Vernon Wells in Commando with his over the top performance and campy moustache but it is nowhere as fun or effective as it was in Commando.
As for Billy Bob Thornton well he’s Billy Bob Thornton in the standard mentor role, nothing more nothing less.
And so that was the Gray Man and I am not angry with this movie but I am very very disappointed in it and Netflix really needs to lift its game if it wants to be taken seriously as a competitive studio as just throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at people to make what they want and then give them no real oversight like a traditional studio would isn’t really working out and with this team in particular it feels worse but maybe we all just saw stuff in them that perhaps wasn’t really there to begin with and they just got lucky with what did work, 1 out of 5.
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