The Gray Man – A Review

Since the role of Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible franchise is not likely to be given up by Tom Cruise anytime soon, Ryan Gosling seems to be auditioning to be the next 007 in The Gray Man, in which he is the CIA’s equivalent of James Bond. The Gray Man though is so over the top that it makes the JB & MI movies seem realistic! This is not surprising since it is written and directed by the Russo brothers, responsible for the Avengers movies, who are also among the film’s twenty producers!

Gosling plays Agent Six (without any double 0’s) who is recruited from prison by CIA spymaster Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) to be a CIA agent with a licence to kill. While carrying out one of his assassination missions he finds out about some rogue dirty work by CIA. The Hitchcock macguffin here being a USB flash containing some damning evidence about this rogue operation. From then on, it’s a game of cat and mouse between Six and Lloyd, a ruthless assassin played by Chris “Captain America” Evans, hired to eliminate both the flash disk and Six.

Not being content with emulating the Bond & MI movies, the Russo brothers have also thrown the “buddy action movie” into the mix, Six’s buddy being another CIA agent, Dani (Ana de Armas). After one loses count of people being killed and cars being blown up, The Gray Man has nowhere to go but to just pile up more dead bodies and blown-up cars and buildings. Granted the action, stunts and special effects are spectacular, the Russo brothers seemingly having been given a blank cheque by Netflix, enabling them to employ two second unit directors, four first assistant directors, eight second assistant directors, four third assistant directors and hundreds involved in special effects, stunts etc. In actions movies the role of the editor is crucial and here they have used one of the best, multi-Oscar winner Pietro Scalia. However, with a threadbare script after a while all these fights, killings and explosions fail to make any more impact. In Mission Impossible, and particularly Bond movies, there is a strong narrative and a carefully designed balance of action, drama and humour, which are found wanting here.

The action continuously shifts from one exotic location to another: Hong Kong, Bangkok, Prague, Baku, Croatia, …and there are shifts in time too (Shea Whigham playing Six’s father in a flashback cameo).  Chris Evans seems to be having fun exchanging his Captain America shield with a moustache to play a bad guy while Ryan Gosling’s seemingly indestructible Agent Six would make Captain America jealous and seem relatively powerless. With India having become a major box office territory, Bollywood star Dhanush is given a juicy role as an assassin with a moral conscience! Talented young actress Jessica Henwick, sporting in my view a more becoming hair style than in The Matrix Resurrections, though under-utilized for most of the movie comes to her own in the latter part of the film and makes a bigger impact than Rege-Jean Page from Netflix’s Bridgerton who I think is miscast here as her boss and a chief baddie.

We are told that the CIA agents and assassins in the film are Harvard educated which doesn’t say much for that esteemed academic institution! Fans of the Avengers movies will no doubt lap up this latest larger than life offering from the Russo brothers. Others may find that in order to tolerate, or even enjoy all the mayhem, killings, explosions and globe-trotting which grow a bit by-the-numbers, repetitive and overbearing, it’s best to give the brain a rest, get the popcorn, and not worry about losing the thread of narrative when going to make a cup of tea, you will already be familiar with the template of these movies. A scene near the end in a maze seem to be inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but the comparison stops there!

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