The Gray Man: High-octane hokum

Ouch. That American spelling. The latest post-MCU outing from the Russo Brothers is, by way of early fan notices, “stacked”, “relentless”, and “brawny”. (Exclamation points are implied.)

No argument here. The film is all of these things.

If only these were attributes that were either necessary or desirable.

The Gray Man, ominously, is one of those projects that has been kicked around Hollywood for more than a decade. Various iterations of the script – based on a novel with Tom Clancy collaborator Mark Greaney – had Brad Pitt and a gender-swapped Charlize Theron attached before the fairy godpeople at Netflix bequeathed a production budget in excess of $200 million.

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The streaming giant’s most expensive film to date provides a great deal of bells and whistles as the plot moves noisily from A to A. Ryan Gosling, playing a cool, enigmatic Ryan Gosling character, has been recruited from prison by Billy Bob Thornton’s shadowy but avuncular agent, into a shadowy mercenary adjunct of the CIA. He is Six, one of the “gray men” of the title.

When a hit goes awry – for solidly ethical reasons – he finds himself in an even murkier world of in-house skulduggery, pursued by Chris Evans with pimp styling.

Evans has fun twirling his porn-tashe in a project that converts the set-up-joke rhythm of the sitcom into asskicking-bit-quip. The forced zaniness of Thor: Love and Thunder has nothing on the exhausting frat-patois of The Gray Man.

Various women – including Ana de Armas and Alfre Woodward – act out token action scenes without meaningfully nudging along the threadbare plot. Prague is impressively pretend-decimated in the film’s most high-octane sequence.

Bond film

It feels almost like a pitch to direct Bond and – in common with the recent 007 spoof scenes in Minions – it’s a better Bond film than (at least) the last two entries from that franchise, save for a couple of things.

The incessant wisecracking approximates a Bond script in which every line is – to name one – George Lazenby’s “Just a slight stiffness coming on... in the shoulder,” with the word “bro” thrown in. The pervasive, juvenile sexlessness, meanwhile, is all Bang Bang without any Kiss Kiss.

On it goes, regardless. Everyone you can think of – from Kollywood star Dhanush to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s Julia Butters – gets at least One Big Scene. There are car-chases and explosions and grunting high kicks. Things are, well, happening on screen.

For all that bluster and the ever-appealing Gosling-brand reticence, one can’t help but pine for the relative complexity of the Fast & Furious sequence. Expect a sequel with a similarly predictable trajectory: The Gray Man: Foregone Conclusion.