Say nope to 'The Gray Man'
Netflix
There is a man with a very particular set of skills. His name is Ryan Gosling, and neither he nor you should be spending time on junk like “The Gray Man,” in which every line is embarrassing, cliché crap that sounds like a 10-year-old trying to rip off that other lousy Netflix action movie he saw last week. Something like, I don’t know, “If you like breathing, you might wanna fix this” or “Make him dead.”
Wait, not something like that. Exactly that.
This comically expensive ($200 million!) showdown of CIA assassins has been hyped for months, and now that the Gosling/Chris Evans vehicle—directed by the Russo brothers of several “Captain America” and “Avengers” movies—has arrived, we can finally ask: At what point will this stop? Do people really still get a kick out of seeing endless gunfire on screen? How is this mindless escape when it’s impossible not to be reminded of the endless gunfire off screen? “The Gray Man” doesn’t deserve responsibility for this alone, obviously. But this copy of a copy of a (repeat 8 million times) still provides absolutely nothing not offered by a “Bourne” movie or a Bond movie or Gosling’s “Drive” or you name it. That it arrived on the same day as Jordan Peele’s “Nope,” which I haven’t seen yet but can say with certainty is at the very least a movie about something made with care, reinforces the degree to which too much of Netflix’s original output is neither original nor worth putting out.
Among a slew of brutal attempts at humor, the only laugh comes from Lloyd (Evans) referring to Six (Gosling) as a Ken doll (can’t wait for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie co-starring Gosling as Ken, which you already knew). There is nothing fun or badass or exciting in the action, though, and nothing even slightly of interest in the manipulative backstory or the endangerment of a child or the interaction between Six and Dani (Ana de Armas). Yeah yeah, we’re traveling around the world and high-powered intelligence folks are corrupt and eek there’s torture and we gotta track down the asset or else the names of every covert operative will be known and blah. Many people die, and yet you (I) watch, totally numb, amazed that a movie with so much charisma in its cast can be such a vapid waste.
“Painfully dull” is the understatement of the year. Empty, obnoxious, upsetting.
D
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