The Grey Man: A Review
/****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW HAS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Ho-Lee-Shit this $200 million movie is atrocious.
The Grey Man is the new action film directed by Marvel billion-dollar blockbuster makers the Russo Brothers (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame) and produced by Netflix, which premiered on the streaming service on July 22nd.
The movie, which stars Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans and tells the story of an off-the-books CIA hitman gone rogue, is most notable because its production budget is $200 million, which makes it the most expensive Netflix movie ever made. And you thought gas was expensive?
Inflation must be very real because $200 million just doesn’t buy you what it used to. The reality is that it would have been a much better decision, and infinitely more entertaining, to just use an intern’s iPhone to record Netflix executives lighting a $200 million pile of cash on fire than to make the disaster area that is The Grey Man.
The plot of the film exists but I’m not sure I can bring myself to actually write it as it’s so derivative and inane. Just know that a sort of Bourne-type CIA assassin (Gosling) goes off the reservation and now the CIA, most notably bitchy bureaucrat Denny Carmichael, played by a truly awful Rege-Jean Page whose acting style consists of nothing but occasionally yelling, are out to get him.
The Grey Man is one of those movies that’s so bad that it’s astonishing, as it seems impossible for so many professionals to be so incompetent at their jobs all at once.
Directors Joe and Anthony Russo (Joe also co-wrote the script) are the most to blame for the shitshow that is The Grey Man. I cannot recall a film that was so poorly directed, as everything from the story to the dialogue to the visuals to the staging to the action sequences to the acting is abominable. In addition, the film is all over the map in terms of tone and feels like ten different movies, all bad, smashed together into one.
The action sequences, which no doubt account for the majority of the bloated budget, are so amateurish and poorly shot as to be criminal. One scene, which must have busted the bank, involves an inner-city European trolley chase and gun fight that looks like it was conceived and shot by a one-eyed man with cataracts who lives in a dumpster behind the School for the Artistically Impaired.
On top of that, the performances are so excruciatingly poor they would make Michael Bay blush.
Ryan Gosling is the star of the movie and plays Sierra 6, so named because “007 was taken”. How clever. Gosling is a charming actor and makes the most of the uneven snarki-ness, but he is not even remotely menacing as a bad-ass CIA assassin, and, thanks to the inadequacies of the Russo Brothers his action sequences are a blurred and obstructed mess.
The luminous Ana De Armas plays a laughably-not-believable tough-as-nails CIA agent working with Gosling’s 6 and then against 6 and then with 6 again. Her character makes no sense and her performance is as throwaway as the rest of the movie.
Chris Evans plays a mustachioed villain named Lloyd Hansen who looks like he just stumbled out of a low-end Provincetown hot spot named “Harvard Hunk Hole” on a steamy summer afternoon. Evans isn’t exactly Laurence Olivier…or Tommy Wiseau for that matter, and the most egregious thing about his performance in The Grey Man is that you can see that he actually thinks it’s amazing. It’s like the wind whistling through his empty skull is playing the Academy Award theme song in every scene and he gets hypnotized by it and actually believes it.
Watching Evans pout and sashay around the movie like a psychopathic Richard Simmons at a sold out Miami Beach Liza Minelli concert was the equivalent of watching the art and craft of acting get hit by an apocalyptic meteor….speaking of which, watching The Grey Man made me envious of the dinosaurs and their extinction.
Speaking of the apocalypse, poor Billy Bob Thornton is in the movie and plays some CIA type dude, and he gets the honor of speaking such sterling dialogue as “hey, she’s got a pacemaker, you asshole!” Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
To give you an indication of how little thought and time went into making this $200 million monstrosity, consider this, not once, not twice, but three times, the Russo Brothers use the same action movie trope involving a grenade to propel the story. As each instance of this idiocy occurred, I kept wondering if I was having a stroke and was suffering from fast-onset dementia. But trust me, despite wishing I was having a stroke so I could lose consciousness and escape The Grey Man, I wasn’t…it was all just the Russo Brothers not giving a shit or even trying when they made this anti-cinematic abomination.
The bottom line is, if someone told me that The Grey Man was actually a science experiment where a band of syphilitic monkeys were locked in a room and given a typewriter, a movie camera and an editing machine, as well as copious amounts of Jack Daniels and meth amphetamine, and then came out three weeks later with this movie in the can, I would’ve believed it but still thought they under-performed.
If you want tangible evidence of how poorly run Netflix is and why it is going into a nosedive, look no further than the atrocity that is The Grey Man.
I urge you to avoid this movie at all costs. You’ll hate yourself even if you just hate watch it…it’s that bad.
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