Main cast: Ryan Gosling (Six), Chris Evans (Lloyd Hansen), Ana de Armas (Dani Miranda), Jessica Henwick (Suzanne Brewer), Regé-Jean Page (Denny Carmichael), Wagner Moura (Laszlo Sosa), Julia Butters (Claire), Dhanush (Avik San), Alfre Woodard (Margaret Cahill), and Billy Bob Thornton (Donald Fitzroy)
Directors: Anthony and Joe Russo
By the time I sit down to watch the secret agent action hero caper The Gray Man, I already hear that they are planning a series and even spin-off shows for this setting. It’s pretty ambitious, I have to say, especially for such an underwhelming movie.
I have a bad feeling when the opening scene makes me cringe. Ryan Gosling’s prisoner character starts this really awful banter with Billy Bob Thornton’s character, CIA official Donald Fitzroy, over bubble gums, and it’s one designed to make me instinctively cower. The delivery is fine, as both actors are pretty good, but the lines they utter reek of try-hard-ism with an extra layer of try-harder-ism—the stuff that will normally cause stand-up comedians to have slippers and rotten eggs hurled at them.
That’s this movie in a nutshell: the cast are certainly up to the task, but the script is a let down.
Our hero that will soon be known as Six was sent to prison when he was 15 for murdering his father. It’s the usual story: daddy was physically abusive, and he killed that SOB to protect his younger brother, and somehow this qualifies him to be recruited as an assassin for the CIA’s top secret Sierra program.
Wait, won’t it make more sense to hire some killer that has no moral compunctions about offing people, as opposed to someone that had killed just one person for reasons one can consider to be justified?
Then again, I suppose the people behind this movie just pull this one out of their rear end so that the audience won’t go, “Whoa! The hero’s a killer! I don’t like him anymore!”
So, Six predictably soon realizes that a botched mission is more than meets the eye, he goes rogue, and surprise, the CIA official in charge of the mission is the bad guy.
Chris Evans plays the bad guy that is hired by the big bad CIA official to kill Six, and he hires another bad guy mercenary to kill Six. The other bad guy, being Asian-looking and hence possesses the mystical honor code that all Asian mercenaries have, decides at a critical moment to help our hero instead, and really, who couldn’t see that one coming?
People that don’t watch this kind of movies much, that’s who, because my goodness, The Gray Man has nearly every freaking action spy trope crammed into its slightly over two-hour runtime without any effort to make these tropes feel fresh or even a little less predictable.
Throughout it all, the cringe dialogues, oh the cringe! Mr Gosling tries, but he and the cast are forced to utter lines that seem to be composed by some hack that is desperately trying to emulate screenwriters that are actually capable of writing humor without pulling me out of a scene forcibly to wince and grimace.
It also doesn’t help that he and Mr Evans are sporting some of the sorriest examples of facial fuzz that I’ve ever seen on any screen big or small. While I don’t expect secret agents to look like GQ models—that’s a romance novel thing, which doesn’t necessarily apply to other things, naturally—I experience a most distracting urge to drag them to a barber every time I see them on screen.
Anyway, I know the people behind this movie sank in a lot of money to make it, so all that talk about creating a gigantic franchise could just be them trying to keep face. Let’s be real, Netflix likely can’t afford the sequel at the rate they are hemorrhaging money, unless they slash down the budget to the levels typically of the usual abysmal-quality streaming slot-filler.
I certainly won’t be holding my breath to see whether a sequel will materialize, when there are much better examples of movies of this sort that one can watch and have a better time instead. This one is just a cringe wannabe of a spy caper, and perhaps best left to Mr Gosling’s legion of loyal but creepy fans to watch over and over.
