Some way into Anthony and Joe Russo's The Gray Man, cheery assassin Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans) tells a CIA tech guy, “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.” It's not a significant line, but I couldn't dislodge it from my brain. Is the techie’s name Babe? Is Lloyd, sadist and psychopath, a fan of wholesome '90s movies about talking animals? Do the Russos expect viewers to get the reference or just ignore it like all the other nonsensical things uttered in the film?
The last point is, I think, relevant. As the camera tracked towards a former
CIA chief in her apartment in Prague, I wondered where I'd heard the song that
was playing. A few seconds later it hit me: Christophe’s ‘Aline’, used in the
trailer for Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch (2021), and in a diamond
commercial starring Ana de Armas. Thoughtful directors use references in a way
that means something, that connects the source to the tribute. But ‘Aline’ has
no more resonance here than in the diamond commerical; it's just some pretty
music.
Rescued from a life in prison by CIA man Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob
Thornton), Sierra Six (Gosling) becomes an elite black ops soldier, the kind
sent on impossible missions, doesn’t exist on paper, etc. He’s been doing this
for 18 years, but we first meet him and Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas) on a
mission to eliminate Four, a previous Gray Man. Before dying, Four tells Six
that his current boss, Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page), is crooked and hands
him a flash drive with evidence. Soon, Six is on the run, and freelance
whackjob Lloyd is brought in by Denny to hunt him down.
Lloyd kidnaps Fitzroy and his young niece, Claire (Julia Butters), both of
whom are like family to Six. Claire is not just a child in peril, she’s an
orphan with a heart condition. This is absolutely laying it on too thick, but
the Russos had great success pairing a kid with a killing machine in Extraction
(2020), and are clearly advocates of repeating what isn’t broken. Even so,
having the chirpy ‘Oogum Boogum’ start to play as a distraught Claire looks
around the room she's imprisoned in shows that the Russos' commitment to their
own emotional bait is thin at best.
The Gray Man is a tight hour and 55 minutes (15 additional minutes of
end credits), with wall-to-wall action. This has the advantage of not making
Joe Russo, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely feel obliged to write more
than standard action hero grumbling: “very small window to take out a very bad
guy”; “he hurts people because that’s who he is”; “make him dead”. But the
Russos, with all the resources of Netflix at their disposal, can’t bring to
their fights and chases the variety, exhilaration and clarity that a film with
this much action demands. Several of these take place in underlit settings,
which seems like a bad compromise—either go all out with dramatic lighting and
staging, like John Wick Chapter 2’s climactic gun battle, or stage it
honestly and visibly, like any random mid-budget East Asian actioner (Dhanush’s
otherwise promising fight scene with de Armas and Gosling suffers because of
this). Sometimes the camera swerves and somersaults with the action, which
feels out of character. There’s a plane-jumping sequence that inexplicably
stops during a mid-air tussle—the next scene is Six calling to say he’s
alive.
Six is the kind of quippy action hero more associated with the other Ryan.
Gosling is hamstrung by an eight-dollar haircut (Lloyd’s description) and a
serial killer beard. His job is to brood and batter, but the actor’s natural
inclination towards silliness comes through in the series of groans he lets out
through the course of the film whenever he’s hit or winded or bouncing off some
hard surface. Only Harrison Ford gets more comic mileage out of the sounds of
physical exertion. Evans as Lloyd is more casting than performance—nasty fun at
times but only because it's Captain America pulling fingernails.
The most unattractive fight I’ve seen in ages takes place in the half light
of the morning. You can see the Russos thinking “Magic hour!”, but it doesn’t
look ethereal, just drab and murky. Gosling and Evans keep whaling away at each
other, the former in special ops black, the latter looking like a football
referee. Both are wearing watches, for some reason. “Let’s see if these moves
fuck,” the psycho says, pulling out a knife. They do not.
This piece was published in Mint Lounge.
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