Genre: Action
Premise: (from IMDB) When the CIA’s most skilled operative, whose true identity is known to none, accidentally uncovers dark agency secrets, a psychopathic former colleague puts a bounty on his head, setting off a global manhunt by international assassins.
About: This is the Russo Brothers first big film after their Avengers movies, and they’ve brought along their Avengers writers, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, to write it. The 200 million dollar film is Netflix’s biggest yet. The Gray Man has been in development for a long time and is sort of a peek behind the Hollywood curtain in regards to how complicated these long-running properties are. The Russos’ version of this movie is so different from the original Gray Man project that none of the writers on the previous drafts even get credit. It’s like they only used the title. Which makes you wonder, why not just come up with an original idea? You can check out my review of the original script here…
Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely and Joe Russo (based on the book by Mark Greaney).
Details: 2 hours long
In the early 1980s, Francis Ford Coppola famously decried the day when Hollywood started publishing box office numbers. “Now,” Coppola said, “people are only going to produce movies that will make the most amount of money.”
That comment seems a little silly now. Why else would you make movies? For your health? Look at France, a country that still doesn’t care about box office, and the cinematic sludge that comes out of their system. I’m not talking about the one good French film that makes it over to the U.S. every year. I’m talking about the 50 other movies that are all terrible because there’s no incentive to make something that people actually want to see. Is that what we want the U.S. to become?
Well, the streaming revolution allowed us to get a peek into what that process might look like here. Since Netflix movies don’t have any box office, their directors, technically, don’t need to worry about how many people watch the film. It’s why we got such Netflix classics as Mank and Roma (a teensy bit of sarcasm there if you can’t tell).
But now, ironically, Netflix has gone in the other direction, moving away from artsy “who cares how many people see it” movies to 200 million dollar wanna-be-Bond action films. The only difference is that we have NO IDEA if anybody’s actually watching these movies.
If you were just to go by online chatter, a lot more people saw “Nope” this weekend than “The Gray Man.” Which would imply that, if The Gray Man were in theaters, it wouldn’t have surpassed 45 million dollars (Nope’s first-weekend gross). Which sort of begs an opposing question. Just as it seems strange to make small budget theatrical movies that aren’t going to make money, it’s even stranger to spend an inordinate amount of money on TV movies that don’t bring in any money.
If all of this seems confusing, that’s okay, because I would argue that The Gray Man is a confusing project, an action movie without an identity. I have a theory on why that is, which I’ll share at the end of the review.
Sierra Six (Ryan Gosling) is a convicted murderer who’s pulled from prison by his new handler, Fitzroy, to be in a new CIA assassin program. Years later, after becoming one of the most lethal assassins in the world (a ‘gray man’), Six is assigned to kill a target who, as the target lays dying, says he’s also part of the Sierra program, and that Six will be next.
Six grabs a USB drive from Four (I think that’s his name) causing Six’s boss, Carmichael, to turn on him, believing the drive has evidence of his nefarious doings. So Carmichael hires the one killer good enough to eliminate Six, Lloyd Hansen (Chris Hansen), a wise-cracking mustache-twirling (literally!) bully.
Lloyd, a giant weasel and purveyor of such lines as, “If you want to make an omelette, you gotta kill some people,” goes to Fitzroy and orders him to order his own men to turn on Six, which they do. But of course Six escapes. This enrages Lloyd, who then orders a super-hit on him, which means that every single bounty hunting team in the world is now looking to kill Six.
Six teams up with another agent for the first time ever, Dani (Ana De Armas), and doesn’t like it because Six works alone, darn it! When Six learns that Lloyd is holding Fitzroy and his pacemaker-laden daughter hostage, he decides to turn the tables on Lloyd and go save them. But can Six survive going into the belly of the beast? Or will he be Lloyd Hansen’s toast?
These movies are so hard to do well.
You’re trying to differentiate yourself within one of the most cliched well-worn blueprints of modern cinema – the big action movie.
The degrees to which you must differentiate yourself to stand out seem trivial. For example, John Wick’s differentiation revolved around well-tailored suits and tighter, better choreographed, fight scenes. A betting man would say that’s not enough to get audiences to show up. And yet, John Wick is the sexiest action franchise alive.
Meanwhile, Jack Reacher comes out, angling for a “thinking man’s action movie” and it lands with a thud.
In my experience, big action movies come down to nailing four things, in this order: A protagonist we absolutely love, groundbreaking or unique set pieces, a strong villain, and a plot that’s strong enough to keep us invested the whole way through.
Let’s start with A. As much as I like Ryan Gosling, there’s nothing about this character that stands out. I don’t know if this is the writers’ or actor’s fault, but I suspect it’s the writers. Gosling has proven he can play cool memorable characters, such as the “Driver” in the movie, “Drive.” What was the difference? Well, it might be each character’s opening scene. In Drive, Gosling had this really cool escape scene from Staples Center that set the tone for the character. Here, we meet Gosling sitting in a chair, smiling as a man tells him he’s free. Not exactly a, “Whoa! This character is so cool!” moment.
Next we have the set pieces. The set pieces are all okay but I was expecting groundbreaking stuff when we’re talking about the most expensive movie Netflix has ever made. The movie-killer for me was the ubiquitous plane crash set piece. Not only has this scene been done in the last 20 action movies, but they didn’t even do as good of a job as “Man From Toronto,” an action-COMEDY for goodness sakes.
Next we have our villain, Lloyd Hansen, played by Chris Evans. Chris Evans is definitely having fun in this role, and is hoping for a sprinkling of Henry Cavill magic, donning a mustache just like Cavill did in Mission Impossible. But while Hansen is the most memorable thing about this film, I’d argue he’s having more fun with himself than we are with him.
The showiness of his performance often borders on “try-hard,” which breaks the suspension of disbelief, and makes us see Chris Evans instead of Lloyd Hansen.
Finally we have the plot. I’ve long chastised big action films for overcomplicating their plots when the objective for anyone watching an action movie is to turn your brain off and have fun. It’s why movies like Taken and John Wick are so popular. The plots are mind-numbingly simple.
In movies like James Bond and Mission Impossible, you need a pen and notepad to keep track of the main plot, subplots, motivations, double-crosses, and everything in between. I wouldn’t put The Gray man in that company. It’s essentially one guy chasing another guy. But there were too many times where I didn’t understand exactly what was going on.
For example, there’s this whole baby-sitting storyline where Six babysits Fitzroy’s daughter and it took me a full five minutes before I realized it was a flashback. I get that they wanted to create an emotional connection between Six and the daughter, but a five-minute flashback in an action movie??? Come on.
I have no idea how this movie came together. But I suspect it went something like this. Netflix initiated a meeting with the Russo Brothers. They said, “We will hand you a blank check and a high percentage of franchise ownership if you give us our own James Bond franchise.”
The Russos then scoured the town for the best available action property. They found The Gray Man, which had been in development for 13 years and, therefore, was well-known around town. They didn’t necessarily like it so they totally rewrote it into their own version. And that’s what we got here.
The reason it’s not very good is because they never had an emotional attachment to it in the first place. Again, blank checks are big motivators to make movies. I’m not turning a blank check down and neither are you. But personal emotional attachment is the motivator to make GOOD movies. And that seems to be missing here.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s hard to scare or anger or evoke negative emotion in an audience with a jokey villain, which Lloyd Hansen very much is. If we’re not feeling those big negative emotions from a villain, we’re not going to be scared for our hero and we’re not going to want to see that villain go down.
What I learned 2 (dark evil screenwriting tip): When writers want to get credit on a movie, one of the first things they do is change all the names of the main characters from the previous draft. This makes it appear, to later WGA readers who don final credit, that they’ve made the characters up wholesale. We see that done here. Can’t let those former writers get any credit and take our money!
