The Gray Man

Hello, Netflix? Yes, I’d like to speak to the algorithm in charge, or at least whoever was responsible for The Gray Man, credited to the Russo brothers but seemingly presented by a soulless machine. The Gray Man offers wildly-generic spy-shenanigans in the tiresome vein of other Netflix wanna-be blockbusters Red Notice or 6 Underground or Extraction and other big star, zero flavour packages with the nutritional value of a chicken nugget. Films like The Gray Man, adapted from a series of books by Mark Greaney, may be original content, but they’re eternally slavish about aping franchise pics tropes and endless world building; billed star Rege Jean-Page really just bookends with exposition in a bloated action flick that reaches a final man-man confrontation in a CGI fountain in a CGI maze a good 30 minutes before the film actually ends.

Codenamed Sierra Six, Ryan Gosling plays the usual unstoppable assassin who, as a novice murderer, we see recruited from the slammer by government agent Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) before we skip to several years later. One night in Bangkok, the tough guys really do tumble as Six semi-botches a wet-job, which turns out to be the murder of another agent from the same programme. Said agent hands Six an encrypted drive, making Six a target of the agency he’s supposedly working for. Six heads to Prague to decipher the drive, but covert villain Denny Carmichael (Chris Evans) kidnaps Fitzory’s kid and ups the stakes…

The big action scene here is Six escaping from a large crowd of super-soldiers, and it’s an eye-bleeding CGI mess, with the usual mixture of astonishing and/or transparently-fake shots. A tram gets fully smashed up together with large chunks of Prague, but despite today’s technology, it’s no more fluid to watch than the terrible ‘blue-screen star/stuntman on location’ shots that mar most Bond films. This kind of scene works as a visceral release in The Bourne Supremacy, The French Connection or Bullitt, but goes for nothing here, since Six immediately turns himself in to the baddies as a strategy move. And the baddies, who have been firing missiles at him, are seemingly happy to capture him without a shot, never imagining a potential trap for a moment. Gosling seems as amazed to find himself starring in this film as I was, looking good, absolutely, but not suggesting a fraction of the inner life that he suggested in an actual film like Drive. Evans seems to be going for comedy, but the film doesn’t carry enough weight to warrant relief, and Ana de Armas is a shadow of her No Time To Die role.

The Gray Man isn’t always as dull as the title suggests; the female characters aren’t bad, there’s a certain tough-guy swagger at times, a few decent lines or neat situations, but it’s hard going, instantly forgettable and impossible to start a franchise with. Do I want to see a Netflix film in which the characters from 6 Underground, Red Notice or Extraction fight The Gray Man? It’s a hard sell because I can’t remember anything about any of them but an air of excess, an outward sheen, a paucity of fresh ideas and an awful lot of green screen…