OPINION | REVIEW: ‘The Gray Man’

Former CIA black ops mercenary Court Gentry/Sierra Six (Ryan Gosling) goes on the run after uncovering some dangerous secrets about the agency in “The Gray Man.”
Former CIA black ops mercenary Court Gentry/Sierra Six (Ryan Gosling) goes on the run after uncovering some dangerous secrets about the agency in “The Gray Man.”


Say this for a film that begins with a fight scene amidst a nest of New Year's Eve firework cannons in Thailand, and ends in a bloody showdown at the center of a topiary garden in Croatia: It's not intended as a think piece. Instead, the Russo brothers, working from a script Joe Russo co-wrote with their longtime Marvel Comics Universe collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have crafted a silly-but-entertaining action thriller that seems to know exactly what "The Gray Man" is, and have absolutely zero problem with it.

It helps tremendously that the cast they've rounded up, via casting director supreme Sarah Finn, including such luminaries as Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas, Billy Bob Thornton, Alfre Woodard and Chris Evans, all seem well in on the fun. Like a box of Milk Duds, it might not stay with you long, but it's easy enough to gobble down.

Evans, in particular, playing an expunged lunatic former CIA agent gone private, sporting a hideous 'stache and sockless shoes, embraces his character's chaotic bonhomie with both arms and both legs ("What I do can't be taught," his character, Lloyd Hansen, crows, in the aftermath of a botched asset retrieval operation so poorly managed it seems to leave half of Prague in ruins). You get the impression the actor made a deal with the Russos: He'd play Captain America in the last two Avengers sequels, if he got to play the villain heavy in one of their next pictures. Consider the debt paid.

Hansen is brought in by a crooked CIA director named Carmichael (Rege-Jean Page), after special black ops agent "Six" (Gosling), part of an underground initiative known as "Sierra," once led by a grizzled man named Fitzpatrick (Thornton), goes on the lam after receiving a secret thumb-nail drive from his most recent target, a former Sierra operative himself.

Unsurprisingly, the file reveals the depth of Carmichael's craven and treacherous push for power at all costs. To keep this explosive file from reaching the wrong hands (i.e., the press), the CIA head sends his right-hand operative, Brewer (Jessica Henwick), to oversee Hansen, a task that proves impossible, given the latter's penchant for tumult and mayhem. Before long, Hansen has nabbed Fitzpatrick's precious niece, Claire (Julia Butters), from Hong Kong, a girl Six had already pledged to protect some years before, to use as leverage against the former Sierra leader, and sends wave after wave of agents after Six, now partnered up with another rogue agent named Miranda (Armas), all of which culminates in the aforementioned Prague apocalypse.

Having used most of his manpower in that failed assault, Hansen hunkers down in a Croatian castle with another squadron of men and weapons, and toting Fitzpatrick and Claire as leverage for a final confrontation with the battered and beaten Six and Miranda.

True to form, the film gleefully globe-trots along, from Berlin to Bangkok, Monaco to Vienna, swooping between countries as if riding a drunken sea gull. The pace swings with much of the dialogue, tending toward the fancifully dry ("I get it," Fitzpatrick tells Six, when they first meet, "you're glib"), as Six gets beaten, stabbed, shot at, slashed, punched repeatedly, sucked out of a plane, dropped into a dungeon, and thrown from a crashing metrorail onto the hood of a car, yet still fires the quips like so many .44 slugs ("My ego is a little bruised," he tells Miranda, after she receives his flying form onto said car).

It's the kind of film that doesn't necessarily want to be taken seriously, even as it's pumping up the action sequences to maximum overdrive (the Prague bit alone goes on for what feels like half the film), throwing so many variables in the air -- including a quick but formidable turn by a delightfully adroit Indian assassin played by Bollywood action star Dhanush -- amid so many bullets and explosions, it dares you to make sense of it all.

Best not to try terribly hard. Existing as it does in a Hollywood world in which 100 crack agents shooting 10,000 bullets can't hit a couple of people in black running more or less straight toward them, and the virtual destruction of several city blocks in Czechoslovakia earns little more than a light slap on the wrist for the CIA, as an audience, ours is not to wonder why, it's to watch more and more bad guys die.


‘The Gray Man’

86 Cast: Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Rege-Jean Page, Billy Bob Thornton, Wagner Moura, Alfre Woodard, Jessica Henwick, Julia Butters, Dhanush

Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

Rating: PG-13

Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes

Playing theatrically and streaming on Netflix beginning July 22

 



  photo  Globetrotting CIA asset Sierra Six (Ryan Gosling) goes on the lam with incriminating information about his former employer in the Netflix thriller “The Gray Man.”
 
 


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