James Bond is out of action, Jason Bourne hasn’t been seen since 2016, and, now that Tom Cruise has turned 60, it can’t be long before his Mission: Impossible missions really are impossible. This, then, could be the ideal moment for a new cinematic secret agent – and The Gray Man seems to be the man for the job. The film is directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, who made the last two Avengers instalments, and it’s adapted from the first in a series of best-selling novels by Mark Greaney. It’s also got a £170 million budget – the biggest ever for a Netflix production, apparently – and it’s got Ryan Gosling in the lead role alongside Chris Evans and Ana de Armas. Everything is in its favour. So how come The Gray Man is such an un-thrilling thriller?
The main issue is that if you’re going to launch a new franchise, it helps if it actually feels new. The Gray Man doesn’t. It’s not just that the hero’s code name, Sierra Six – or Six for short – is strangely familiar (“007 was taken,” he admits), and it’s not just that the brassy score always seems to be building up to the signature riffs from the James Bond theme and the Mission: Impossible theme. The truly hackneyed part is that Six is on the run from the very people who trained him. The Russos pretend that their plot is complicated: they keep interrupting the story with flashbacks, cuts to other characters, and captions explaining that we’re in Bangkok or Monaco or London or Vienna or Berlin (so many locations, so few memorable shots of those locations). But in fact, the scenario is boringly simple. A secret agent’s employers are after him: will he be able to deal with them before they deal with him?
One problem is that this was all done better by The Bourne Identity 20 years ago – and The Gray Man borrows a huge amount from that film, including its shady, jargon-choked CIA meetings and its beautiful sidekick (De Armas, far less engaging than she was in No Time to Die). The other, bigger problem is that The Bourne Identity spawned several sequels, and several more wannabes with the same agent-vs-his-or-her-own-handlers premise, including Salt with Angelina Jolie, Safe House with Ryan Reynolds, Hanna with Saoirse Ronan, RED with Bruce Willis, and Knight and Day with Tom Cruise. Even Daniel Craig’s James Bond got in on the act in Quantum of Solace. The Gray Man is so late to the party that everyone else has gone home.
The Gray Man
Directed by: Joe and Anthony Russo
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas
Length: Two hours
All that separates the Russos’ film from its predecessors is that it’s a lot more stupid. After many happy years as a CIA hitman under the command of his beloved boss and father figure Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton with a Colonel Sanders beard), Six gets hold of a USB stick containing some incriminating data about Fitroy’s smug young replacement Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page). Yes, a USB stick. Not exactly cutting edge, is it? The one-dimensionally evil Carmichael calls in a one-dimensionally crazy contractor called Lloyd (Chris Evans with a moustache) to retrieve the doohickey and to bump off Six, and Lloyd in turn calls in every team of assassins in his little black book. Yes, he has unlimited funds. And yes, the assassins have the magical power to converge on Six, wherever he is in the world. And yes, they’re all able to take truckloads of heavy artillery through customs. And yes, these supposedly covert organisations and elite hit squads can fire rockets at each other in city squares without anyone asking any awkward questions.
It’s fair to say that Greaney’s idea of Six being a mysterious figure who can slip into the shadows, unnoticed by anyone, has been abandoned in favour of absurdly over-the-top mayhem, so if you enjoy seeing planes, cars and buildings being blown up in a fake-looking way, then The Gray Man will pass the time. But there are only so many landmarks you can see being levelled, and innocent by-standers being slaughtered, before you start to question whether it’s all worth it. Six, remember, isn’t out to save civilisation as we know it. He’s just hoping to send one CIA officer to jail. In Greaney’s novel there was a billion-dollar oil deal at stake, but there’s no sign of that in the film, so it’s hard to care about any of it. If Six had just handed over the USB stick in the opening 10 minutes, wouldn’t the world have been a better place?
The mindless destruction might have been bearable if The Gray Man had been a comedy – and there are times when it almost is. The characters always have smarmy comebacks at the ready (although they’re witty without being funny), the ever-cool Gosling raises a smile by treating the violence as a mildly irritating inconvenience, and Evans is entertainingly horrible as a sadistic sociopath. But this knockabout nonsense is interspersed with upsetting torture scenes, and numerous shots of a child being terrified by all the carnage around her. The Russos clearly couldn’t decide which tone to go for, so they made a zany farce about cheerful super-spies, and then they made a cynical conspiracy drama about death and trauma, and they kept cutting between them.
The result is a film that never seems to know what it’s doing, or why. The irony is that it keeps trying to be The Bourne Identity, and yet it still ends up with an identity crisis.
★★☆☆☆
