Movie Review : The Gray Man (2022)
Certain movie genres are more difficult to make with a straight face in the twenty-first century. A convincing spy thriller is particularly hard to pull off in a post-9/11, post-Homeland world, where people are better informed about what the CIA does. One way of pulling it off is to not even remotely pretend to be serious about what you’re doing, which is how the Russo brothers approached their new project The Gray Man. If cinema was the internet, it would be the very definition of a high effort shitpost.
The Gray Man tells the story of Six (Ryan Gosling), a murderer who was released from prison to become part of a secret CIA assassin program. He served the agency for eighteen years until an operation goes bad and he’s tricked into killing another member of the same program (Callan Mulvey). Six turns against his employer and disappears with an asset he was supposed to retrieve from his colleague’s corpse. So, the man he crossed (Regé-Jean Page) sets on him a vicious and immoral killer unbound by law (Chris Evans).
The Gray Man is Unserious
If you want to appreciate The Gray Man as much as I did, you have to understand something right off the bat: it’s made by a group of extremely talented people who are thoroughly unconcerned about what the final product will like. They’re having too much fun making it. It is technically superb and narratively moronic, but it doesn’t really matter that it is. What matters is that Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans are absurdly good at playing two soulless killers trying to wipe one another from existence.
Regulars of the site know my love for well-crafted antagonists and while Evans' Lloyd Hansen isn’t exactly that, his interpretation is fucking brilliant. Now, Hansen is a garden variety psychopath who hurts other people for his own enjoyment. What makes Chris Evans' interpretation so convincing is the fits of ungovernable rage he gets into whenever he's facing the slightest amount of adversity. It’s not badass rage. It’s self-sabotaging, out of control violence that explodes of ouf him like lava out of a volcano.
Evans is dead serious about his craft, but the part he's dealt is a cross between a James Bond villain and a cartoon character. Gosling plays another one of these wisecracking characters who has no identity, so that young men in the audience can think "he's literally me" and he leans on it more heavily than ever. Jessica Henwick plays a character named Suzanne, solely based on the fact it's fun to hear Chris Evans say: "I just got shot in the ass, Suzanne." The film always takes backseat to fun, mindless stuff and it’s great.
Because you can't take The Gray Man at face value. A film about a tender hearted killing machine being chased around the world by a not-so tender hearted killing machine is silly. But a series of ridiculous action scene where Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans banter like drunken frat boys is fun. I have no idea whether Joe and Anthony Russo were any serious when producing this movie, but common sense wants that they were just fucking around and flexing the Hollywood muscle they earned with the Avengers movies.
If not, this is a 200M$ movie made exclusively for the viewing pleasure of twelve year old boys.
The problem with secret agents in the twenty-first century
I'm not the biggest spy fiction enthusiast out there, but a film like The Gray Man faces a credibility challenge in an age where a) geopolitics are taken with the utmost serious by anyone with a social media account and b) it’s possible to fact check pretty much anything. If you want to operate inside that creative paradigm, you either have to take yourself as seriously as a Twitter analyst or basically make peace with the face your film will feature two men cosplaying their unchecked toxic masculinity.
I have nothing about a bucket full of toxic masculinity myself and it definitely seems like it’s the route The Gray Man has decided to take. I can’t, for the love of me, take a film seriously when it features Ryan Gosling in a red blaze, a goatee and a flimsy moral justification for being a government killer. He’s half-smirking for half of the movie, for fuck’s sake. But there’s something absurdly satisfying for a middle-aged man like myself about witnessing two dudes trying to murder the shit out of each other for two hours.
Unlike a movie where the stakes are too big to be credible, I think it's the straight out absence of stakes that makes it so much fun. It’s like playing a game of Grand Theft Auto. The fun is just to push the envelope and see where the characters are willing to go. There's one hell of a cathartic pleasure to find yourself amidst destruction and wreckage you could not possibly conceive before pressing PLAY. Maybe I’m a violent weirdo for thinking that, but I do live my violent weirdness without hurting anybody.
*
The Gray Man is very odd and very fun at the same time. It’s like the spoof of an action movie a character from another movie would watch, except it’s featuring Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans and Ana De Armas (who’s character doesn’t have much of a point, except for dragging Gosling's out of trouble). Nothing about this movie is meant to be taken seriously. It's very much a cheap companion piece to films like John Wick and it’s perfect the way it is. Please watch with an alcoholic drink for optimal enjoyment.
