In recent years, Netflix has been doing everything to become a Hollywood studio for everything: signing the great directors and stars to long-term contracts, participating in the production or distribution of films that compete for the Oscars, and the like. Now she goes up another level and presents her most Hollywood production: the sparkling spy thriller “The Gray Man”.
Its budget, 200 million dollars, is the highest in the history of the streaming service’s films, and would not have embarrassed even Blockbuster. Its directors are Joe and Anthony Russo, who signed the greatest Hollywood hits of our generation: the last films in the “Avengers” series; And its stars are the hottest names on the market – Chris Evans, who worked with the directors when he played Captain America in the Marvel hits, Ryan Gosling and Anna de Armas, who already worked together in the bombastic “Blade Runner 2049” as well, Reggae Jean Page, who broke out in “Bridgerton”, Oscar winner Billy Bob Thornton and others.
In past years, a movie like “The Gray Man” would go to theaters, show on the biggest screens and stay there for a few weeks. In contemporary reality, it went up a week ago for symbolic screenings in several theaters in the United States, and today (Friday) it goes up on the streaming service in the rest of the world and here. Watching it reveals that, disappointingly, not all that glitters is gold, and behind all the numbers and stars hides a rather bleak thriller.
The script is based on the successful book of the same name by Mark Greeny, which was also published in Hebrew. At least in the film version, the plot is so trite that it seems to have been written by an algorithm. Gosling plays a man who served a prison sentence following a murder, which he carried out coldly. The secret service pulls him out of there, and recruits him to a strictly secret group of tough and highly skilled exterminators. He performs his job satisfactorily, but then reveals things he should not have known about elements within the organization. They want to silence him and take over a flash drive with sensitive information in his possession, and send him a psychopathic subcontractor played by Evans to get rid of him. If we got a million dollars for every time we heard a story like this, we too would have $200 million to spend.
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To add some humanity to the story, it turns out that the cold-blooded special agent has feelings after all. He took out his guardianship over a girl who, due to her health condition, walks around with a pacemaker, and his new enemies use her to blackmail him. She is played by Julia Butters, who stole the show in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”, when she played a child prodigy who conducts a long and emotional conversation with the failed actor played by Leonardo DiCaprio, until at the end he bursts into tears.
This time, the effect is not the same. There is no chemistry between the character of the agent and that of the girl, and the relationship between them is difficult to convince. In general, Gosling fails to convey any emotion in the film, and maybe he doesn’t even try that hard. True, the frozen face is his trademark that also led to his initial breakthrough, but didn’t that shtick wear itself out? For 200 million dollars you can get some facial expressions.
Chris Evans tries a little harder. For a change he plays the bad guy. His character enjoys killing people and even more – insulting them. At one point he calls his opponent played by Gosling a “nest doll”, perhaps referring to the fact that the actor will soon star in a film based on the “Barbie” brand. In any case, the effort is admirable, but the character of the hired killer and the sadist was distasteful. Her jokes about the girl’s health cross the line of good taste and are inappropriate, certainly in the context of a movie that most of the time pretends to be light entertainment. The Russo brothers have not yet really succeeded outside of the “Avengers” films, and even here they have difficulty controlling the result and dictating a clear tone.
The pace of the film is frantic. It does not stay in the same place for more than a few minutes, sometimes not even more than a few seconds, and also moves between different points around the world. In the last episode of “Mission Impossible”, which “The Gray Man” tries to imitate, they invested when they placed part of the plot in the city of lights, and the result was beautiful and spectacular accordingly. Here, the American agents arrive in Prague. Why there? Perhaps the answer is that it is much cheaper to shoot in Eastern Europe. It turns out that even in the case of the most expensive film in their history, Netflix is being stingy.
The action scenes don’t justify the price tag either. They are well made and enjoyable to watch, but they do not take your breath away, do not leave a mark and do not manage to redeem the film from its mediocrity. From beginning to end it is appallingly casual. There are so many things you can do with $200 million, but Netflix invested it in a kind of “mission impossible” for the poor. “The Gray Man” is a complete waste of time and money.