At a glance, The Gray Man has everything you'd crave in a high-octane action movie. Drive's glowering Ryan Gosling stars as the titular anti-hero, a hired assassin with a heart of gold. Knives Out's Ana de Armas and Chris Evans reunite for another showdown of wits and, this time, plenty of combat. MCU juggernauts Joe and Anthony Russo share directing duties, promising splashy stunts to take advantage of the ludicrous budgets Netflix drops for such star-studded projects. Despite all this, The Gray Man fails to be solidly fun. Instead, it feels like a mixtape, pulling bits from a bunch of much better, much more daring action movies, to create a medley that is mediocre at best.
Written by Joe Russo, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely, The Gray Man is based on a novel of the same name by bestselling author Mark Greaney, but the movie's plot points seem nakedly stolen from a slew of memorable action films. Like Suicide Squad, Six (Gosling) is a "hardened criminal" who is let out of prison to go on top-secret assassination assignments for a shady government organization. Like The Bourne Identity, this highly trained assassin falls out of the organization's good graces when he botches a hit to save a child bystander. Like the Bourne franchise or Black Widow, he goes on the run to preserve his life and bring the shady organization down. Like John Wick, a huge bounty is put on his head, sending a swarm of killers on his tail. Like Léon: The Professional, he's trying to best the baddies while protecting a young orphan girl (Julia Butters) from harm. She was Taken by a mercurial mercenary (Evans), so Six and his "particular set of skills" are on a mission to get the girl, save the day, and limp off into the sunset, maybe with his pretty female colleague (de Armas). And along the way, he'll do his own (less impressive) version of the Oldboy hallway melee.
From its first scene, it's hard not to feel like you've seen The Gray Man before. To the Russos' credit, they try to dress up this ruthless retread with a globe-trekking journey that bounces between beautiful settings, like Bangkok, Berlin, Baku, and Monaco. Despite its title, which is meant to refer to the moral gray area that Six works in, the film is alive with color: neon-lit nightclubs, a bespoke suit in brilliant vermillion, sprays of yellow and red light in fireworks and gunfire, and teal backlighting that brings contrast to shadowy fight scenes. Hell, even the MacGuffin — a flash drive hidden in a medallion — is golden. Sadly, the frantic pacing and hasty edit of the film, which nonetheless clocks in at a grueling two hours and nine minutes, make The Gray Man an eyesore.
The Gray Man's action is a miss.
There are plenty of fight scenes, but the actual fight choreography is frequently uninspired hand-to-hand combat. The Russos seem to know these sequences fall flat; as if to distract us, the editing is especially frenetic, bounding from location to location without concern for visual flow or spatial geography. This turns several fight scenes, including a sprawling, city-smashing car chase, into an illogical blur. Even sequences with less moving parts suffer from the Russos' determination to overstimulate their audience. Gosling's numerous battles are often obscured by distractions: a flashlight's beam bopping about a dark room, smoke bombs billowing around the battlers, or actual fireworks exploding around warring rivals. His lunges are ramped up in the edit, so the punches and kicks should feel more forceful, but the feeble sound design deadens the impact. In The Gray Man, you'll see each punch, stab, and bullet biting into flesh, but without a sound design that squelches hard, these injuries seem minor, even when the characters are bleeding profusely. It's practically the exact opposite experience of watching (and hearing) Jordan Peele's Nope in terms of communicating carnage through sound rather than relying on graphic onscreen violence.
There are a few notable moments where the coverage and the edit actually click, and the fight scene that stands out the most is a simple affair involving a man, a woman, a table, and a cable. Without all the razzle-dazzle of sparks and swish pans, de Armas and her onscreen enemy deliver a brief but satisfying battle that actually thrills.
Chris Evans is wicked fun as a mustachioed villain.
Like his MCU bud Chris Hemsworth in Spiderhead, Chris Evans seems to relish the opportunity to slide into a baddie role. If you loved him as the lusciously sweatered, duplicitous douche in Knives Out, you'll appreciate his distinctive turn as Lloyd Hansen, a gleeful killer with the trash 'stache of a Boston cop and the casual wear of a Wall Street dirtbag. Evans sinks his teeth into every moment, whether Lloyd is torturing an asset, springing into a punching match, or chastising his victims for their highfalutin vocabulary. ("Don't say 'preternatural' to me. It's an asshole word.") Sadly, the dialogue repeatedly lets him and the rest of the cast down.
For every zippy line ("If you think I'm going to rat someone out for Bubbalicious…"), there are a dozen more in desperate need of a punch-up. ("These are unhonorable people.") While Evans' manic energy makes some of his rougher lines go down smooth enough, Gosling and de Armas stumble in their cool posturing, trying to find the fun in bickering over keyboard typing and gun-throwing etiquette. Their chemistry is likewise lackluster, making the will-they-won't-they of their edged flirtations more frustrating than fun. Even their occasional punchlines don't land, because the banter is at the same overactive speed as the action. There's no time for a joke to register before Six and company are spewing exposition lines or punching people again.
Gosling's slow-burn performance is smothered by all the smoke, explosions, flickering lights, and clamorous cutting. Where his cool-as-a-cucumber Six should play as a slick foil to Evans' volatile villain, the film is too caught up in its flashy visual confetti to dig into character. Anything below a big gesture is lost in the fray.
The Gray Man is mediocre.
Watching the Russos' latest, I was annoyed by the cherry-picking from far more entertaining action movies, all to slap together something so frenetic, with no lasting impact or sense of fun. The Gray Man is not the kind of movie that you need to see in theaters. (The Russos agree.) It's the kind of movie you can throw on while you're doing dishes or fiddling on your phone. In bursts, it's amusing. Overall, it's tiresome, lacking any emotional wallop, consistent wit, or the kind of verve that might actually make even its stolen bits sting.
In the end, all of this makes The Gray Man another miss for Netflix. Though the streaming studio has been praised by acclaimed filmmakers for offering them creative freedom and big budgets to boot, resulting in stunning films like The Irishman, The Power of the Dog, and Okja, it seems to be a license to coast for star-studded action flicks like Red Notice, Spiderhead, and now The Gray Man. If only everyone had brought the teeth-gritted drive to push the envelope that Evans had to this movie, then this Gray Man might have been more than meh.
The Gray Man is now in theaters and on Netflix.
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