A fight would start, in which Ryan Gosling would be facing impossible odds against a horde of baddies, and I'd feel a surge of excitement, then I would hear Zanna's laughter, accompanied by a scathing comment ("Here we go again", "It's just so boring", "Ugh", etc), and I would feel obliged to laugh and scoff and agree. Had I been watching alone, I would inevitably still have grown to hate it by the time of the third or fourth fight scene, minutes into the movie, but it would have been nice to find my own way there.
In lieu of story or character development, viewer interest is driven predominantly by anticipation of the many, many explosions, but there are other things that caught my attention/I found interesting: Chris Evans' impressive upper arm size and tone, as displayed in his character's preferred outfit of a fitted, short-sleeved shirt; Gosling's unholy bare torso; the unbelievable arrogance of film-makers to think that a movie made up almost entirely of repetitive fight scenes deserved a running time of two hours.
The movie's premise was so simple as to be insulting, so it was impressive that it also managed to be confusing. The thing I found most baffling was the character played by Ana de Armas, who seemed to have no good reason to regularly and continually risk her life in mortal combat with the enemies of Gosling's character, who she'd only just met and never even pashed. At the end of the movie, I repeatedly tried to ask Zanna what she thought the point of de Armas' character was, but I couldn't get her attention because she was in the middle of providing an increasingly bemused running commentary on the names of the crew in the credits: "Two dudes … dude, dude, dude … dude … dude, dude … dude, dude … dude, dude … dude … dude, dude … dude. Oh look! A woman! Dude … dude, dude…"
The advance chatter about this movie, the most expensive Netflix has ever made, was all about how it was the platform's big shot at reviving itself after a massive drop in its share price and subscriber numbers. I guess it's possible this movie will help, but I'd feel much more hopeful for humanity if it didn't.
SHE SAW
About 20 minutes into The Gray Man, I said out loud, "I hate this movie", yet I think I'm about to argue that it was quite good. There's so much violence - cover your eyes-type violence - including incredibly long, comically implausible, fight scenes but the film doesn't take itself too seriously and by the standards of a Die Hard-esque genre flick, it's quite successful. I even stayed awake for the whole masochistic thing.
This isn't to say I disagree with Greg. The plot is basic, stupidly so. Sierra Six, played by Ryan Gosling, is recruited out of prison by the CIA to become an anonymous operative - "to kill bad guys"… but, plot twist, some 20 odd years into the job, Six acquires some compromising information that makes him rethink whether he and the CIA are on the same page as to who the bad guys are. Enter Rege-Jean Page, who puts a target on Gosling's back and hires the uncouth, morally bankrupt, bloodthirsty Chris Evans to do whatever it takes to eliminate him. Throw in a sickly child that Six will do anything to protect and a back story about a tyrannically violent father and we're all in on Team Six.
There's some obligatory female bad bitches, played by Ana de Armas, Jessica Henwick and Alfre Woodard, to ward off any accusations of sexism. We all know that was probably the work of a diversity supervisor from Netflix, who insisted they change Danny to Dani and Steve to Suzanne for the optics but I'm not mad at that because the film is otherwise drowning in its own toxic masculinity.
It's non-stop action and destruction. You can see the $200 million they spent on the movie being destroyed in front of your eyes. There's one set piece in which Gosling fights off an entire SWAT team, arriving by the van-load, while handcuffed to a rail in the middle of Prague. The ensuing action, which took six weeks to film, is a human massacre that seemingly destroys much of historically significant central Prague. Some people like that kind of thing.
Certainly, a lot of thought has gone into making each of the nine central fight scenes visually dynamic. One takes place amid pyrotechnics, one on a military plane that's disintegrating around them, one on an urban train, one at a castle, etc, etc and so forth. For that reason, The Gray Man is wasted on Netflix. If you like back-to-back carnage and corny jokes, then you should try to see this in a cinema. If you prefer richly complex, thought-provoking stories and are even mildly concerned about the glorification of guns in popular culture, then you shouldn't try to see this at all.
The Gray Man is in cinemas and streaming on Netflix now.
