The Gray Man Review: You Wouldn’t Expect Gosling & Evans to Star in Such a Terrible Film!

The Gray Man, directed by the Russo Brothers, is the latest outing from an elite high-budget bubble where Netflix shells an absurd amount of money on often middling and tedious action films. 6 Underground, Project Power, Triple Frontier and Red Notice were a previous few examples. Based on Mark Greaney’s novels of the same name, this 129-minute action-thriller stars Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, and Ana de Armas in the lead roles, with Jessica Henwick, Regé-Jean Page, Julia Butters, Dhanush and others rounding off a pretty impressive ensemble cast.

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The storyline of The Gray Man begins with a covert mission involving Six (Ryan Gosling), a top asset CIA agent, assassinating one of his own after receiving orders from a new regime in the agency. However, before losing his life, he gives Six a drive holding top secrets against the organization, which triggers a global hunt by deadly assassins set loose by Lloyd (Chris Evans).

Before I rant my way through the remaining part of the review, let me just breeze past through a couple of positives. For a change, it is nice to see Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans in different roles when compared to what we’re used to before. Their cat and mouse chase, accompanied by only a few action sequences, was partly entertaining to watch in a two-hour movie.

With that said, I genuinely want to know who greenlit this film at Netflix? Who, in the glass towers at California, read or listened to this script, high-fived, thought it’s a great idea, and threw 200 million so effortlessly? If you’re wondering why this (once) streaming giant is consistently losing subscribers each quarter in the recent past, this is one of the preliminary reasons. If they continue to flow with the mentality of big money plus big names equals a great product, the only people they will be keeping happy are their stockholders.

What lacks in The Gray Man is a good, exciting story. The abomination we got as a final product was bland with no life and no thrill. It is entirely predictable and has no character depth or emotion whatsoever. You just can’t finalize or accept this when you pay big bucks, and bring in the guys who made blockbusters like Endgame and assemble a highly-talented cast from all around the globe.

I had my reservations about Joe and Anthony Russo because they didn’t really impress me outside the MCU bubble. And, without a doubt, this had to be one of their worst works together as a duo. I’m a huge fan of Captain America:  Winter Soldier, and it might just be my favorite MCU film, but with The Gray Man, they were so by-the-book in their approach that resulted in not-so-funny jokes, horrible pacing, bad dialogue, and forgettable action scenes. Now, a day after watching the movie, I cannot recollect or remember anything.

Overall, The Gray Man is a disappointment, and it is frustrating to watch Netflix burn money like this. If they improve their filtration process and get a good team who has a grasp of what is an entertaining film and the balls to challenge the storytellers to do better when they pitch films like this, I guarantee it would stop their decreasing subscriber count. I didn’t expect The Gray Man to be this bad, especially when you have Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, and Ana de Armas as your lead stars.

‘The Gray Man’ Rating – 2/5

Images via Netflix