Six MacGuyver’s his way out of one trap, but a lot of his escapes and “How’d he get theres?” are skipped over just to plunge into the next action beat. The fights? There’s the opening act to-the-death wrestle in the middle of a New Year’s Eve fireworks rocket-launching pad, a mid-air melee on a military cargo jet, a throw-down on a Viennese tram and an oddly perfunctory punch-out with a Tamil assassin (Dhanush) that ends because the plot needs it to end and heck, they want this Netflix movie to play in India. Lloyd kidnaps Six’s recruiter (Thornton) and the old recruiter’s infirm niece ( Julia Butters), the one who loves “Silver Bird.” Six’s colleague Miranda (de Armas) shows up, every now and then, to save his bacon.Īsia to Eastern Europe, Bangkok and Baku to Prague, Vienna and scenic Croatia, the hunt is on, with hunters hunting a hunter and the hunted having his own ideas about that. “Hand the jumper cables to somebody else,” he’s ordered. Lloyd Hansen (Evans) is the sort of guy who does his torturing in Monaco, who quotes Arthur Schopenhauer mid-torture because the famed German pessimist “saw the value of suffering.” That’s when the CIA calls in an independent contractor. The MacGuffin here is a SIM card with incriminating evidence of misdeeds and treason, which the target of a hit gives to Six and Six won’t hand over to his sketchy supervisor (“Bridgerton’s” Regé-Jean Page). “You know what makes me sad?” “Your small hands?”īilly Bob speaks for us all when he passes judgement on the film’s tough-guy-banter-generator. The other half? Strained jokes, some of which land. That’s the tone of half of the dialogue, “wet work” jargon, “COS” (Chief of CIA Station) acronyms and the like. “Collateral” damage has entered the room. He is “Six,” as in “Watch your six,” or because “Double-O-seven was taken.”īilly Bob Thornton plays his recruiter, the guy who’s retired years later when our “Gray Man” is ordered to pull the trigger, and doesn’t. Gosling plays an imprisoned murderer recruited to be a “Gray Man,” a CIA assassin, because he’s already killed somebody. And the globe-trotting “plot” is so embarrassing that “novelist” Mark Greaney should take his Netflix millions and flee the country. I mean, staging a couple of slaughter scenes to the 50 year old pop hit “Silver Bird” is a reminder than only James Gunn should have access to the action cinema cheese tray. Still, they got Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Evans’ “Knives Out” co-star Ana de Armas, Billy Bob and Alfre and a pretty good Indian action star, Dhanush (“Karan”) for it, so it can’t be all bad. It’s so hackneyed it’s like the Russos are trying to parody hackneyed, blowing their own punchlines as they do. Yes, some have been blinded by the Spandex, by all those comic book heroes playing together like Superfriends, by famous actors who all “stick the superhero landing.” Take those bomb-proof trappings away and the Russos can still stage an over-the-top action beat - a decent fight, a pretty-good digitally-augmented chase adhering to the laws of Bugs Bunny Physics.īut man, “The Gray Man” is one seriously stupid movie. Imagine staring, slack-jawed as the “Gray” credits roll, and realizing for the first time, “Wait, the Russos suck?” If “The Gray Man” does nothing else, Netflix’s latest blank-check action thriller is going rock the worlds of legions of Marvelettes, those fanatics who have been whining about the latest “Doctor Strange” and “Thor” on Twitter because, as one wag put it, the acclaimed directors behind them “didn’t make me cry” and “didn’t have the depth of story” of - you know - the Russo Brothers’ many Marvel outings.
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