by Chris Bakker, Contributing Writer
There has been no shortage of people ragging on Netflix’s slate of original movies over the last few years. Comments about them looking cheap, being clichéd and same-y, and overall lacking in quality. Netflix has addressed comments along these lines by voicing their intentions to make fewer, but better movies to try to keep people on board with quality instead of quantity.
It would seem like a good move forward, then, to make movies like Red Notice, attaching big stars to the project and putting a blockbuster you’d normally go to the theater for on their streaming service. The Gray Man follows the same train of thought as Red Notice, starring Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, and Ana de Armas, some of the biggest draws of the last few years, and with Joe and Anthony Russo helming the project. Handling a $200 million budget should be right in their wheelhouse after making four movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe over the last decade.
Gosling stars as codename Six, a man recruited out of prison by Billy Bob Thornton’s Fitzroy to work for the CIA. We meet him just as his employment with the agency is about to come to a grinding halt, after which Six is thrown into a game of cat and mouse by his new boss Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page). Chasing him is torture specialist Lloyd Hansen, Evans with an absolutely appalling mustache. Along the way, Six has to make use of old contacts and new allies in order to deliver a microchip that can unravel the agency’s plans into the right hands.
Unfortunately, where the idea of a giant adventure movie in Red Notice seemed like a great idea, but ultimately fell flat, The Gray Man is an all-too-familiar espionage thriller in the vein of modern classics like The Bourne Identity, or basically any other movie you’ve ever seen that follows a special operative who’s suddenly targeted by their own agency. It’s a globe-trotting movie that seems to have picked locations purely for the set pieces it allows, and while that’s not necessarily a bad way to go about making your movie, it also makes for some ludicrous moments where characters just show up at exactly the right place and at exactly the right time with no attention given to travel time, information provided to them, or indeed spatial awareness.
I have to imagine that most of the $200 million went to shooting on location and signing on the cast, because for a movie with two-thirds of the budget that Avengers: Infinity War had available, there is very little of that money visible on screen. There is a shockingly bad CGI sequence involving an airplane in the first half of the film, and the amount of care given to geography in the action scenes make it look like they were on a deadline on a budget a tenth of its size. The Russos have never been able to properly put an action sequence on screen without the aid of Marvel Studios’ pre-visualization unit, so it does somewhat boggle the mind as to why they were tapped to make what is essentially a wall-to-wall action movie with a few moments of character work thrown in between.
I don’t want to make out like The Gray Man is as bad as Red Notice, because that would be unfair to it. It’s simply a mostly dull affair that is not helped along in any way from a stylistic standpoint. There are a few moments where it’s very clear that there were ideas behind certain scenes; it tries to play with color, lighting, and some environmental design that has potential to it. However, the way it’s shot and edited leaves a lot to be desired, in a way that those things are simply there without seeming to contribute to the idea behind the action.
It has to be said that none of this is the fault of the cast, because there’s not really a bad performance to be found in The Gray Man. We know Gosling can play this kind of character from his days working with Nicholas Winding Refn on Drive and Only God Forgives, and Evans does play the sociopath who’s after him with at least a little bit of glee to him, but overall it feels like there’s not a whole lot to any of these people other than tropes that were pulled out of a drawer labeled, “Things that make people care”. When your script is lacking those real emotional touchstones and any creative flair in your plot, you’d better be damn sure the action is up to snuff, and once again that’s just simply not the case here. I was especially hoping for more from Ana de Armas in that sense, because her turn in No Time to Die was a favorite of mine, along with many other people.
All in all, I realize I’m coming across rather harshly on The Gray Man, which definitely isn’t a bad movie. It’s just one you’ve seen before multiple times over, and it lacks the excitement it so dearly needs. Just reading about the version of this that was going to star Charlize Theron, with Christopher McQuarry at the helm, makes me long for a world in which that version had existed. As it stands, you’re far better off simply watching The Bourne Identity again.
Score: 5/10
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