OUT NOW: The Gray Man

Super spy (Ryan Gosling) realises his employers are dirty.

Evil CIA people (Regé-Jean Page and Jessica Henwick) send a bad guy with an annoying haircut (Chris Evans) to kill our anti-hero.

To give him some weakness, Evil Moustache kidnaps a young girl (Julia Butters) Super Spy is friends with.

Cue many people dying and s*** blowing up.

A 200 million dollar attempt at a new spy action franchise, The Gray Man has plenty of bells and whistles.

Headlined by Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans, written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, The Gray Man is intended as an all-star vehicle for Netflix.

Instead it is a case of the Emperor has no clothes for its makers.

There is something lifeless about The Gray Man which I could not shake.

 

The characters and plotting have been done before.

There is no time to breathe - big set piece moments pass in seconds (while stuck atop a train, Gosling kills a baddie by using a passing reflection from a building window to aim).

Nothing about this movie feels exciting.

The flashbacks to establish Gosling’s humanity are so familiar it gets annoying in its predictability - it is yet another ‘heartless killer bonds with a child’ story, but with nothing new to add.

Gosling underplays so much he is rendered inert.

Chris Evans chews the scenery but his villain feels like the bad guy from a million action movies.

Billy Bob Thornton and Alfre Woodward collect pay checks.

Ana De Armas has found a film that gives her nothing to do beyond shoot and kill things. 

The people I watched it with enjoyed it but even they pointed out how familiar the final showdown was.

The movie has a big budget but there is nothing about it that sticks.

Production designer Dennis Gassner - veteran of the James Bond franchise - lends the film some modernist flare (the club in the beginning is eye catching), but it all gets blurred into the background by the pacing and the muddy cinematography.

Like Ambulance, The Gray Man makes a lot of use of drone shots in place of camera movement, but to no real effect.

Increasing the sense of repetition, Henry Jackman’s score comes off as a series of variations of the same chords played on  percussion. 

What is infuriating is that there is little to differentiate The Gray Man from the dozens of DTV action movies that share its plot. Most of those movies are probably more fun to watch than this bloated mess.

If you are interested in watching an action movie about a one-man-army murdering people to rescue a child, there are better examples than The Gray Man.

Just re-watch The Nice Guys.