The Gray Man (2022) Review
3/10
A prisoner is recruited out of a sentence into a deniable CIA program, spends eighteen years killing people, acquires evidence of corruption, and becomes the target of a private contractor hired to retrieve it.
The 3 is for a film built from components. Every element in it is recognizable from somewhere better, the assembly is professional, and the result has no identity of its own at any point across two hours.
The Gray Man disappoints more than plenty of worse movies, because every piece of talent it needed was already hired. Gosling, Evans, de Armas and two hundred million dollars, and the finished thing has all the personality of an airport lounge. I spend two hours waiting for somebody behind the camera to make a choice. What it shows most usefully is what happens when a budget is spent on scale instead of on specificity, and what a streaming release does to the economics of that decision.
The Protagonist Has No Properties
Sierra Six is competent, quiet, morally sound, protective of a child, and has a past involving an abusive father. That’s the complete character.
Ryan Gosling is capable of a great deal more and the film asks him for calm competence and nothing else. He’s never wrong, never frightened, never funny in a way that reveals anything, and never makes a decision the audience could disagree with.
Compare what the same actor does in Drive, where a man with almost no dialogue has a slightly alarming interiority. The difference is that the earlier film gives him things to want.
The film also gives him a prison sentence he was recruited out of.
That’s the one detail with any weight in it, and the film never goes back to what he did to earn it. That omission is maddening. It’s the only door into the man, and the script bricks it up.
The child is the film’s attempt at a stake and it doesn’t function, because Six’s protectiveness is established immediately and never tested. He’s asked to choose between the girl and something else exactly zero times.
Claire also has a heart condition, which the film mentions and then uses once. That’s the same problem at a smaller scale. A vulnerability introduced and not pressed is an item on a list.
A protagonist who’s always right has no story. Competence isn’t character, and an audience needs to see somebody choose wrongly at least once to believe they’re choosing at all. Give them a flaw that costs them something inside the plot, not a backstory that explains why they’re good. A person to protect isn’t a stake unless the protection conflicts with the objective. Otherwise the reader understands that both will be achieved.
Test it by asking what your protagonist wants that they can’t have. If the answer is nothing, you’ve written an operative instead of a person.
Evans Is the Only One Enjoying Himself
Lloyd Hansen wears a moustache, tailored trousers and a permanent smirk, tortures people casually, and is written as a man who finds the whole business amusing. Chris Evans is very good in it and the performance is from a different film. He’s playing a comedy and everybody else is playing a thriller. That’s the same structural mismatch as Momoa in Fast X and it recurs constantly in this category. The reason is probably that a villain with a personality is the one role a committee-written action film can still permit. The hero must be broadly likeable to a global audience, and the antagonist has room to be specific.
Evans also had to be persuaded that the moustache was the character, by his own account, and it turns out to be correct. One decision about how somebody looks gave the whole performance a shape that nothing anywhere in the script was supplying.
That’s worth noticing as a pattern. When the most memorable character in a film is the villain, the protagonist has usually been sanded down to avoid alienating anybody. Evans is the only part of this I’d sit through again, and even he seems to have wandered in from a sillier, better movie.
Ana de Armas is the other performer with something to play and the film gives her almost nothing to do with it. Dani is competent, loyal and present, and her entire arc is deciding to help somebody she’s already decided to help.
Geography Is Abandoned
The film moves through Bangkok, Baku, Berlin, Vienna, Monaco, Prague and Croatia, and none of those locations affects anything. That’s the symptom of a streaming budget. Money is spent on travel because travel reads as production value in a two-minute trailer, and no sequence is built around the properties of where it takes place.
Compare what a good action film does with a location. The Prague tram sequence is the exception here and it works because the tram is a constraint. Six is handcuffed to a bench in a moving vehicle in a public square with shooters on every side.
Everything else is a courtyard, an airfield, a compound and a hedge maze, and the film could have shot all of it within fifty miles of one another without changing a frame of the drama.
The Vienna sequence is the clearest waste, and the most indulgent. A safe house, an extraction, a firefight, and nothing in any of it needs a European capital when a warehouse an hour outside Los Angeles would do the same job. Somebody paid for that trip, and I can’t find a single frame that justifies it.
A location is only worth using if it constrains somebody. A city name in a caption is set dressing, and a tram somebody is handcuffed to is a scene. Ask what your setting makes impossible. That’s the only thing it contributes.
Variety isn’t character. Seven cities that behave identically are one city, and the reader will experience them as such. Spending on breadth is the standard error of a well-funded project. Depth in one place will always read as more expensive than shallowness in seven.
The Cutting
The action is assembled from very short shots with frequent digital transitions, drone moves through impossible spaces, and a camera that circles continuously. What this removes is orientation. During the Prague sequence the film cuts between at least four positions in a few seconds, and the audience is following an impression of chaos instead of a situation. An impression of chaos is easy to produce and nearly worthless. A situation has positions, distances and an obstacle, and it can be held in a reader’s head. That’s the only reason anybody worries about an outcome.
That’s a choice and it’s now the default in this category, and it’s worth stating what it costs. A viewer who can’t tell where the threat is can’t feel anticipation, and anticipation is the entire mechanism of suspense. Open Range on this site shows the alternative at a fraction of the budget.
The drone shots are the clearest tell. A camera that passes through a window, under a car and around a corner in one uninterrupted move is telling the audience that no physical camera was present. That’s also telling them nothing physical is at stake.
The hedge maze at the end is where all of it comes together, and it makes me want to throw something. It’s a good location for a confrontation, with sightlines, dead ends and a reason to be lost in it, and the film shoots it with a camera that can see over the walls.
I’d have locked the camera at head height and let the hedges hide the threat. The scene is thrown away.
Two Hundred Million on Streaming
The reported budget was around two hundred million dollars, making it among the most expensive films Netflix had produced, and it was released into homes.
That changes what the money is for. Theatrical spectacle buys an argument for leaving the house, and a film delivered to a television competes with everything else on the same device, including the phone in the viewer’s hand. A film that can’t be followed while somebody is half-watching has a structural disadvantage, and a film built to survive half-watching has already given up.
Netflix announced a sequel and spin-offs within days of release, on the basis of viewing figures the company defines and reports itself. That’s a different kind of evidence from a box office number.
A theatrical number is audited, comparable across films and reported by a third party. A streaming figure is several accounts that started something, defined by the platform, published when it flatters and withheld when it doesn’t.
Neither arrived on the announced timeline. The pattern across this whole page is a work positioned as the beginning of something, and the something arriving late, diminished, or not at all.
Know where your work will be consumed and what it’s competing against there. A book read in ten-minute fragments on a commute needs different paragraph architecture from one read in an armchair. That’s the same question a playwright asks about the back row.
Never write to survive inattention. Work built to be half-consumed teaches the reader that half is enough.
Be skeptical of success metrics defined by the party reporting them. That applies to platform viewing figures and to any number a publisher quotes you about your own book.
Should you watch The Gray Man?
No. Two hundred million dollars, seven countries, two of the biggest stars available, one good sequence involving a tram, and a protagonist who’s never wrong about anything, delivered to a television to compete with a phone. It gets a 3 from me because the tram and Evans’s moustache are worth something, and everything else is expensive crap made by people with the talent to do far better who settled for a trailer. I resent that more than I’d resent a cheap bad movie.
