"The Gray Man": review

Ryan Gosling as Six and Chris Evans as Lloyd Hansen

What do the Russo brothers do when they're not churning out a blockbuster film like "Avengers: Endgame"? They take a 2009 novel titled The Gray Man by Mark Greaney and make it into a Netflix movie costing around $200 million. So "The Gray Man" is a 2022 action film directed by Anthony and Joe Russo. It stars Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jessica Henwick, Regé-Jean Page, Wagner Moura, Julia Butters, Dhanush, Alfre Woodard, and Billy Bob Thornton. The movie swims in the same pool as other franchises ranging from James Bond to John Wick to "Nikita" to Mission: Impossible, so to that extent, there are no new surprises here.

Courtland Gentry (Gosling) ends up in prison for killing his abusive father after the father began thrashing Courtland's brother. His sentence is commuted with the help of Donald Fitzroy (Thornton), a CIA agent who offers the young man a way out, but only if Courtland agrees to be trained by the CIA to be a "gray man," a CIA operative of dubious legal status, performing operations that the US government can't officially sanction. Fast forward eighteen years later, and Fitzroy is in retirement, but he is the guardian of a teenaged niece named Claire (Butters). Courtland now goes by the code name Sierra Six because he is the sixth graduate of the CIA's black-ops Sierra program, which means that Six doesn't have any official records: he is a ghost. Nevertheless, Six has a reputation, and there are people in the world who actually recognize his face.

At the beginning of the story, Six is ordered by section chief Denny Carmichael (Page) to take out a target who is in possession of information that, we are told, is a threat to US national security. Six acquires the target and is ready to liquidate him, but a child appears and stands too close to the target for Six to risk the hit, so Six backs off, claiming his gun jammed, much to the consternation of on-site coordinator Dani Miranda (de Armas) and Langley-based Suzanne Brewer (Henwick), who works under Carmichael. Six manages to fight and kill the target by eliminating the man's guards and getting close to him, but before the target dies, he tells Six that he was Sierra Four, and he hands Six a mysterious medallion that Six later discovers contains information on a small USB drive about Carmichael's corrupt activities. Six keeps the medallion and refuses the standard CIA exfil, instead calling his old contact Fitzroy and requesting his own exfil. Carmichael, desperate to recover the information on the USB drive, elects to send in a wild card: ex-CIA operative Lloyd Hansen (Evans), a sociopath who was booted from the CIA for his insane ruthlessness. Hansen immediately knows that, to locate Six, he has to get to Donald Fitzroy, and to get Fitzroy to comply, he has to kidnap Fitzroy's niece Claire, who survives thanks to a surgically implanted pacemaker.

That's the essential setup: Six is on the run from the CIA and a whole army of mercenaries whom Hansen has tempted into the game via a bounty. Six, meanwhile is openly told by Fitzroy during a tense phone conversation that Claire has been kidnapped, so Six must not only avoid capture but also try to rescue Claire. Dani Miranda has to decide whose side she's on: Six's initial refusal to assassinate Sierra Four besmirched her reputation within the CIA (the operation to kill Four had been planned by her), but once Six realizes that Carmichael is killing off Sierra assets, Six tells Dani that she might be next on the list. The story jumps all over the world in the manner of most spy movies, taking us to Bangkok, Prague, DC, and parts of Croatia. It's a somewhat complicated plot with a resolution that I didn't see coming.

While the story of "The Gray Man" is fairly run of the mill, the movie ends with what I think could be an awesome setup for a sequel. A sequel is already in the works, which spoils the question of whether Six survives this story. I doubt the filmmakers will take the story in the direction I'd like to see it go, especially if the story follows the course set up Mark Greaney's novels (none of which I've read). 

"The Gray Man" does a good job with its pacing, and some of the action set pieces, including one involving a plane and another involving a tram, contain "wow" moments for the action-lover. The globetrotting story shows off some iconic locales as well as some lesser-known but still beautiful places. The setting for the final battle was a bit disjointed, I thought, because it featured a hedge maze that I don't recall seeing when the location was first introduced (maybe I just wasn't very observant). The Russo brothers owe a big debt of gratitude to both Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese: Spielberg popularized those sweeping action shots while Scorsese was a master of long tracking shots, and the Russos have somehow managed to combine both techniques to produce their eye-catching action sequences (I was reminded of Sam Hargrave's "Extraction" and its CGI-augmented long takes).

The film also contained some laughable implausibilities, but since this is a standard action movie that doesn't pretend to be high art, I'm willing to forgive some of these problems. One unintentionally funny scene, though, involved the filling of a deep well with water from a three-inch-wide pipe as a way to solve the problem of being detained. This was such a long, slow solution to the problem that several action beats occurred outside of the well before the water in the well got high enough to allow our hero to do his thing. Another issue was a huge plot hole: Lloyd Hansen calls in a bunch of other assassins, but only a few teams show up. I was ready for "John Wick: Chapter 3" levels of mayhem, with assassins erupting out of the ground in a relentless wave.

Ryan Gosling turns in his usual stoic performance. He's a likable screen presence if a bit wooden. He's not Keanu levels of wooden, but he's trapped in a weird netherworld, somewhere between a flinty Clint Eastwood and a stern-faced Bruce Willis. In this case, though, the story requires him to be a dead-eyed killer who nevertheless develops a soft spot for Fitzroy's niece Claire. Gosling's acting range allows him to radiate intensity when necessary while also letting us glimpse a bit of tenderness now and again. Julia Butters's Claire comes off as sassy but vulnerable; the scriptwriters give Claire more adult-level wit than she should have, but the overall effect isn't too annoyingly precocious. Ana de Armas isn't bad as the tough-as-nails Dina Miranda, and she's not made into a Mary Sue: even though she spends a lot of time rescuing Six, Dina gets her ass handed to her by Tamil assassin Lone Wolf (Dhanush). Unfortunately, de Armas looks a little too cute to pull off the scary vibe she needs to emanate at the end of the story when she personally threatens Carmichael. Billy Bob Thornton is comfortable in his role as Claire's uncle and guardian, and I'm always happy to see Alfre Woodard in anything (she plays Prague-based contact and ex-handler Margaret Cahill, who is terminally ill but able to help Six decrypt the USB).

The film's greatest disappointment may have been Jessica Henwick's character, Suzanne Brewer. Brewer is sent by Carmichael to supervise insane wild-card Lloyd Hansen, but she spends much of her screen time doing little more than impotently complaining about Hansen's methods and his frustrating inability to neutralize Six. I felt sorry for Henwick, who is no stranger to action movies and TV. I would have liked to see her getting out in the field and kicking ass herself (everyone agrees that Henwick, as martial-arts master Colleen Wing, was the best thing about Marvel's failed "Iron Fist" series). Her character Suzanne does see a tiny bit of action at the very end of "The Gray Man," but that's it.

The film's greatest asset, though, is probably Chris Evans as the insane ex-CIA agent Lloyd Hansen. Lloyd, with his corny mustache, is arrogant and blithely unconcerned when it comes to protocol and all the other rule-bound niceties that, in his view, hamstring the rest of the CIA. Lloyd is also the source of most of the movie's comic moments, especially in his final fight scene with Six after he's had two of his fingers taken off by a gunshot. Evans plays Hansen in a way that reminded me of his hilarious Lucas Lee from "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World"—another arrogant character who deserves his fate. It's interesting to see Evans, in this movie, as a scenery-chewing villain instead of as straight-arrow Captain America.

All in all, I can't say that "The Gray Man" was anything approaching excellent. As a spy movie, it dove deep into the usual clichés. The cinematography, while mostly top-notch, did have a tendency to do this annoying swoop-up-and-to-the-right thing that would take us from a street view to an aerial view. Doing it once as a way to establish a scene was fine, but doing it at least three or four times became somewhat bothersome.

At the risk of revealing some spoilers, I want to talk about my vision for a sequel. By the end of the movie, Six shoots his way into the compound where Claire is being held by the CIA. She's not there as a prisoner, per se, but she certainly doesn't enjoy the freedom that a normal teen her age ought to enjoy: she's under constant surveillance. So Six steals her away from the compound, and they drive off to an uncertain future. With Six as Claire's father figure now, I think it would be really cool to watch as Six, whose area of expertise is lying low, teaches Claire everything he knows about spycraft and being invisible. While I wouldn't want Claire's character to be made into yet another cookie-cutter Mary Sue, I think it'd be great to watch her become a capable young woman, perhaps eventually joining the CIA herself when she's older. Maybe the sequel could see her use her training to rescue Six. I don't know. I mainly want to see the girl get trained and follow something like a Luke Skywalker story arc (original trilogy, not the sequel-trilogy nonsense). I think that would be a treat, but again, I don't see the filmmakers following this path.

So "The Gray Man" is an entertaining bit of fluff—very derivative in concept and story, but filled with enough well-choreographed ass-kicking to satisfy most action hounds.