The Gray Man (2022)

The Gray Man (2022)

5/10

Starring

Ryan Gosling

Chris Evans

Ana de Armas

Billy Bob Thornton

 

Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

If you want to like this movie, after you’re done watching, stop. Do not think about it again. I made that mistake and started to ask myself, “How come Six flipped?” What kind of agent flips just because someone knows his secret identity and his unit? He was supposed to be a great agent, and he flipped just by the mention of his name and unit?

I would have preferred a Count of Monte Cristo kind of thing, where he delivers the message (here it was a flash) and is taken, not knowing what the message he delivered was or why he was taken. Give me some suspense, not the same old “top people in the government are crooked and use government agents to clean up messes.”

The Russo brothers' The Gray Man main challenge is that it’s borderline average. Predictable at its best, and sometimes it dragged way too long in some scenes. It was like the Russo brothers have a thing with Prague. The Prague scene dragged longer than I could have imagined. The way the lead character, Six (Ryan Gosling), keeps getting out of tight corners made the men after him seem simple, like children chasing after a serial killer who has infinite bullets and weapons at his disposal.

I believe Six spoke too little, and Hansen (Chris Evans, the main antagonist) spoke too much.

The Gray Man is about a recruited CIA agent named Six. Six was part of a covert team that worked under the radar, killing people for the government. Six was sent to kill someone but hesitated because there was collateral damage pending if he did. He then decided to kill the target another way. It was there the target called his name and made Six question his orders. Six collected a flash from this victim and gave it to a trusted party to decrypt so he could know what was going on. His refusal to give up the flash (lying that he didn’t have it) made the people in government go after him with everything, calling in a man named Hansen, who is not mentally stable, to go after Six.

In the end, I kept wondering how Miranda (Ana de Armas) was so lucky at times, finding Six and helping him, like she had a tracker on him or something. What would have made this movie amazing would have been if the final showdown between Six and Hansen was like what we saw in Equilibrium, but that’s just me thinking. There, the main bad guys and their henchmen couldn’t take on the main character.

You can catch this movie on Netflix, and I’m sure a lot of noise will be made about it, even though I believe it doesn’t deserve to have that much praise for just being mediocre.