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The Gray Man is a Dreary, Inept, and Indeed Quite Gray Action Thriller

The Russo Brothers may be the most insecure filmmakers working in Hollywood today. Certainly they are the most vocal in their insecurity –and it does make some sense. In spite of their enormous successes they aren’t afforded the same respect and adulation that their counterparts in blockbuster moviemaking thirty and forty years ago had. They are seen as company men, not artists –and they desperately want to be the latter. It’s why they make a point to state their influences are Truffaut and Bergman and Antonioni, insist on contriving inspirational choices in their work, and get extremely defensive about criticism –which they’ll respond to by decrying auteur cinema (despite clearly wanting to be seen as auteurs), calling cinemagoers elitist in contrast to streaming (while having just a few years ago praised the theatrical distribution model), and refusing to let go of a three-year-old grudge against Martin Scorsese. They crave validation so nakedly it’s pitiable.
And the sad truth is that the Russos don’t seem capable of executing a vision themselves –they rely on someone else holding the creative reigns. I went into this exact thing a year ago when their Cherry came out. And now The Gray Man, supposedly the most expensive movie produced for Netflix, which suffers many of the same problems, only confirms that suspicion. Even with all the resources in the world, an A-list cast, and subject matter well equipped for expressive filmmaking, they still can’t make it in any way interesting.
Working off of a script co-written with Marvel scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and based on a book by Tom Clancy successor Mark Greaney, The Gray Man is a nation-spanning cat-and-mouse game between two highly trained CIA operatives. There’s Sierra Six, played by Ryan Gosling -the moral one who uncovers incriminating levels of corruption surrounding a high-ranking official (Regé-Jean Page); and then there’s Lloyd Hansen, played by Chris Evans, the sociopathic agent pursuing him on behalf of their CIA handlers.
A formula thriller plot and one composed almost entirely of clichés, The Gray Man may be the worst screenplay Markus and McFeely have yet penned, evident right from the start where a de-aged Billy Bob Thornton delivers blankly to a de-aged Gosling his own character profile -this level of hackneyed exposition is used for several more characters through the movie in lieu of more organic introductions, we’re read basically their entire personalities so the movie doesn’t have to be creative in showcasing them. And as the movie goes along the plotting only gets more derivative, the dialogue only more egregious. I think these writers have been in the Marvel offices too long (it’s been nine years since their last non-MCU credit, for Michael Bay’s Pain and Gain no less); and they’ve forgotten how to write for real people, or even just people whose identities aren’t predicated on a certain level of sarcasm and winking cynicism. Though the subject matter is quite different, those Whedon-descendant Marvel-isms pop up all over the movie, feebly disguised as a prevailing sense of humour. Yet they are also a needed crutch as demonstrated by any time they must deviate from it and can only fall back on the most tired and overused of dramatic dialogue conventions. Often the tongue-in-cheek stuff contrasts sharply, even incoherently, with the films’ desired brutalism of tone. A guy quips while he’s pulling out someone’s fingernails, wry remarks follow severe situations of assassination or destruction. These would be bad on their face, but they can’t even be delivered with any energy, in spite of a star-studded cast usually charismatic and engaging.
Ryan Gosling really works as brooding, stoic figures, but The Gray Man reveals how dependent the effect of that is on his having good, strong direction. It also helps to have a defined character, as he did in Drive and Blade Runner 2049. But in this situation as Six, he has neither of those things and the result is an extremely dull and thin screen presence that never earns even a modicum of investment. He’s the good guy largely because we’re told he is, and any aspect of his personality seems generated from a computer of archetype actions and backstories. He spends a chunk of the movie paired with Ana de Armas as an ally agent, a reunion from Blade Runner 2049, though you’d hardly expect to notice given how little chemistry they have this time around. There’s comparably more life in Chris Evans’ performance, although he too isn’t terribly remarkable. He seems eager to play bad guys now that he’s done with Marvel, but only really has one modulation he can go to for it -resulting in a performance that merely recycles a lot of his mannerisms and attitude from Knives Out, albeit with a lot more scenery-chewing. Several other good actors appear in roles that don’t do them justice, chief among them Alfre Woodard (the second time the Russos have done that to her), but also Thornton and Jessica Henwick, Shea Whigham and Tamil-cinema superstar Dhanush. Even de Armas is given relatively little to work with as the supposed female-lead of the movie (Henwick has more screen-time but it’s almost all in service of tedium).
The Russos structure their film in confounding ways, cutting frequently between multiple point-of-views for no substantive reason apart from apparently their own whims. And while the pacing is often fairly hectic, there is one not-insignificant stretch dedicated to a flashback of Six being a babysitter for Thornton’s niece (Julia Butters -the girl from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), who would later be the captive he must rescue. It’s meant to establish a relationship, but their interactions are notably clumsy and irrelevant, and plagued by more of that unconvincing humour. Though speaking of clumsiness, such dynamics have nothing on the action scenes, which are uniformly messy and in some cases, incomprehensible. In each fight scene, the camera moves so frantically, the geography is so distorted, that it becomes impossible to tell what exactly is going on. I suspect part of this is to disguise the deficiencies of the CGI, most of the action scenes having a distinct artificiality to them that suggests more digital choreography than practical performance is at play. The fact that these are generally lit very dimly would seem to support this. Although it could also just be more simple incompetence in how to construct cinematic action. The set-pieces too aren’t well-executed, unoriginal and conveyed through the most bland techniques possible.
According to Wikipedia, an early version of The Gray Man was supposed to be helmed by James Gray, with Brad Pitt in the lead role. That pair eventually went on to make Ad Astra instead, leaving this film to be picked up by Hollywood’s latest wonder twins -and that is where it was doomed. Because this movie didn’t have to be this bad -nothing in its’ root DNA of genre or story or character would preclude that. Its’ faults lie entirely with the Russos, Markus and McFeely, and their specific approach based in the contours of the superhero media they’ve been entrenched in for much of the last decade. They even give it an overtly elaborate end credits sequence indistinguishable from the Marvel brand -they don’t know how to do it any other way. And unless they can learn, or unlearn that crippling methodology, the legacy they seek as great filmmakers will forever be out of reach.

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