The Gray Man

If you're looking for a big, dumb, straight-to-Netflix action thriller, you could do a lot worse than The Russo Brothers' launch of a new blockbuster franchise. The Grey Man stars Ryan Gosling in another quiet, meticulous killer performance in the Drive vein—amazing that this Mouseketeer grew up to be the closest thing we've got these days to a young Clint Eastwood. In this adaptation of Mark Greaney's debut novel, Gosling plays an elite assassin who is recruited into a secret CIA program called "Sierra" by Billy Bob Thornton. When he discovers agency intel even more dastardly than having a secret assassination program in the first place, he's set for termination. But he's so elusive his bosses are forced to bring in a psychotic former CIA director (Chris Evens) who sets off an all-hell-breaks-loose international manhunt.

The film is meant as the first instalment of a franchise along the lines of the Jason Bourne, Mission: Impossible, and even James Bond series. It has non of the intrigue of those durable blockbuster programmers, but when compared to something like the prior year’s dull-as-a-butterknife The Protégé, it plays like a home run. The all-star cast includes Ana de Armas as Gosling's elite assassin colleague, who only really succeeds in killing any excitement I had about her future as an action star after her terrific cameo as a kick-ass Bond girl in the prior year's No Time to Die. Alfre Woodard gets trotted out and placed in a chair in the hope of lending some gravitas to the proceedings as Gosling's former handler. Dhanush, the rising star of Tamil cinema, comes in Marvel-backdoor-pilot-style to establish his Indian assassin-with-a-code character, Avik San—no doubt soon to be getting his own series. And Julia Butters, the little girl from Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, gets a plum part as Thornton's child-in-jeopardy niece—with which she does a hell of a lot more than her nothing role as Steven Spielberg’s little sister in this year’s The Fabelmans. But whatever enjoyment this picture generates is terminally undercut by its unforgivably stupid villain, played with tedious gusto by Chris Evans. Movies like this MUST have a good villain or else what's the point? How can we care about the situation the hero is in when we don't buy the bad guy as a threat? Evans and everyone who surrounds him at the CIA are just plain dumb.

Since they directed four Marvel movies, including 2019’s Avengers: Endgame (the second highest-grossing movie of all time), the Russo brothers are technically the second most commercially successful directors of all time, with only Spielberg ahead of them. I'm not sure if that really means anything these days, but I do think these guys are skilled enough to know what to do with the $200 million they got from Netflix to make this movie look amazing. However, when you consider what Michael Bay did this year with the $40 million Universal paid for Ambulance, the Russo's film seems like less of an achievement and more of an embarrassment.

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