Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jessica Henwick, Regé-Jean Page,
Wagner Moura, Julia Butters, Dhanush, Alfre Woodard, Billy Bob
Thornton
One of the defining moments of action cinema is the climactic brawl
between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in 1972's Way of the Dragon.
Were Lee and Norris two of the best actors available in 1972? No, but
they were the best martial artists, and nobody was buying a ticket for
Way of the Dragon expecting an acting masterclass. Just as
it's better to cast singers and dancers who can't act in a musical than
actors who can neither sing nor dance, in action movies it's better to
cast people who can perform stunts and pull off convincing fights than
actors who fail to convince as action stars.
Today, only straight to VOD movies feature real action stars, with big
budget action movies fronted by accomplished actors, unless you count
Tom Cruise, who at this point is both an accomplished actor and a fully
fledged action star. Neither Ryan Gosling nor
Chris Evans can hold a candle to Lee and Norris in the action
stakes, so when they face off for a climactic duel at the end of the
Russo brothers' bloated spy caper The Gray Man, it's not exactly an edge of your seat encounter.
Casting actors rather than martial artists has led to the practice of
chopping up action scenes in a manner that's supposed to disguise the
fact that the actors don’t know how to throw a punch or perform a
spinning kick, but nobody is being fooled at this point. The action
scenes in The Gray Man are torn to shreds with rapid fire
editing, and are often drowned in blasts of light so as to further
obscure its cast's limited physical abilities. The movie features more
action sequences per minute than most, but they all blur into one
two-hour piece of CG enhanced sludge.
If the script required a degree of acting talent, you might excuse the
decision to cast Gosling ahead of let's say Scott Adkins, but the
dialogue here is so simplistic even Steven Seagal might ask for a
rewrite. A lot of it consists of characters either telling us who
exactly they are or who other characters are. Said characters rarely
live up to the hype. We're told Gosling's Six is the CIA's best agent,
but throughout the film he fails to demonstrate this, often having to be
bailed out by fellow agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas) when he
finds himself on the run from the agency after uncovering a conspiracy.
We're likewise told that Evans' Lloyd Hansen is the world's top
manhunter, yet he seems to make a terrible fist of tracking down and
capturing Six.
The Gray Man can't quite figure out what type of spy
movie it is. Depending on which scene you're watching it's either aiming
to ape Roger Moore era Bond or Daniel Craig era Bond. As a character,
Gosling's Six is all over the place. At times he's a taciturn Jason
Bourne type, while elsewhere he's cracking one-liners, flipping back and
forth between the silent tough guy he's played for Nicolas Winding Refn
and the smartass of
The Nice Guys. It's as though he had been written by two different screenwriters who
forgot to share notes. The movie often seems to want to appear dark and
gritty, but then Evans pops up as a cartoon character who insists on
mocking the nonsensical nature of the movie he's in. With Evans's Hansen
spending a lot of time looking at screens and making wisecracks about
how silly the whole affair is, The Gray Man might be the
first movie to double as its own Mystery Science Theater 3000
episode.
The movie's editing is such a mess that you'll struggle to figure out
the timeline. It either takes place across two days or two weeks. The
Russos don’t seem to have ever looked at a map of Europe, as characters
manage to hop between continental capitals at an improbable speed. At
one point Six is trapped in a hole rapidly filling with water, yet while
this is happening Dani is able to drive from Berlin to Vienna in what
couldn't be more than an hour. Other inconsistencies include a cellphone
surviving a fall from a plane and a kid's record collection magically
transporting from their home in Hong Kong to a CIA safe house in the US.
I feel sorry for whoever has to edit this film's CinemaSins episode, as
it will likely be longer than the actual movie.
The Gray Man is in UK/ROI
cinemas now and on Netflix from July 22nd.
