The Gray Man has an action problem

The Gray Man, otherwise known as the most expensive Netflix film ever made, is about one man chasing another man. Ryan Gosling is the hunted; Chris Evans is the hunter. For a film with an estimated budget of $200 million, that’s about as deep as the premise gets. I get very restless when a frantic action thriller opens with shadowy sequences, leaving us to join the dots about a globe-trotting narrative till midway through the film. But I faced no such problem with The Gray Man – the story is basic and endearingly daft from the very first frame. It never goes beyond the hunter-hunted dynamic. It’s all hulk-smash; Michael Bay would be proud.

It opens with a prisoner named Court Gentry (Gosling) getting his sentence commuted in return for joining the CIA as a ‘gray’ covert operative named Sierra Six. No training montage, no quiet moments, no second thoughts. Cut to 18 years later, late into his career, when Six chances upon dark agency secrets during a mission and promptly becomes a target of the CIA, who then hire a psychopathic former agent named Lloyd Hansen (Evans) to hunt him down. Hansen’s methods – which starts with kidnapping the niece of Six’s mentor and founder of the Sierra program – are questionable. The brooding-agent-rescues-little-girl trope is as old as time, but Six escapes death in multiple Bourne-meets-Bond-meets-Hunt ways only to finally return for the niece and engage in macho hand-to-hand combat with Hansen against the backdrop of a rising sun. We all know how it goes. Gosling is fine. Evans porn-stache is cool.

Dhanush appears for a scene or two, and his cultural identity – Hansen calls him variants of “Tamil man” at least twice – is repeatedly invoked so that the studio can lend some credibility to a role that’s nothing but clickbait for Netflix’s South Asian market. He plays a hired assassin with, of course, a moral core: He turns on his employers (like any good Tamil man allegedly would) once he discovers that they are harming a young girl. It’s token casting really – what with the publicity machine forcing the makers and lead actors to wax eloquent about Dhanush – but it isn’t the first time Indian superstars have been roped in for commercial reach and it won’t be the last. (Alia Bhatt is slated to “star” in Heart Of Stone). Dhanush’s utility in the film isn’t different from Brazilian star Wagner Moira’s – better known as Pablo Escobar in Narcos – who does a blink-and-miss cameo in The Gray Man to tap the South American market.

However, the one-line plot and cover-all-bases casting aren’t the issues. Granted, the emotional stakes are low: It’s just two handsome men playing blow-up across Europe – and there’s no reason for us to invest in Six’s adrenaline-fueled journey. By that logic, though, Mad Max: Fury Road would be a laughably poor film. (It’s not). The truth is that The Gray Man has an Action Problem. It’s not that the film is all relentless style, with no substance. It’s that the action itself – the calling card for this mega-budget flick – is incoherent, clunky and, at times, insufferably loud. It’s no coincidence that the directors are Marvel superstars.

The Russo brothers have defined an entire generation’s reading of on-screen explosions and high-octane action, with two Captain America films and two Avengers movies to their credit. They took the Michael Bay formula – which is to blind by VFX and pummel the viewer into submission – and framed it within a more crowd-pleasing context (comics). It’s more acceptable when it’s human-shaped creatures, and not machines, doing the smashing. In the MCU movies, though, the sheer volume and jumbled imagery of the action sometimes added to the allure, as if to say: These superhumans are so cool that they can even own the most convoluted and crowded set pieces. They’re so great that they can win even when they don’t know what they’re doing or where they are. They’re so funky that they can outsmart the film’s frantic editing. The viewer’s disorientation – with the anatomy of an action sequence, especially those blinding blitzes at the end of every film – leave them numb enough to slowly discover (as opposed to instantly pick on) the consequences or casualties of every battle. A crucial character dies in all the chaos and suddenly, the madness of it all is humanized.

But a spy actioner like The Gray Man cannot afford to use the same action language. For the viewer, it’s important to be awake to the geography and rhythm of every sequence, no matter how audacious. Yet, nearly all the 8 or 9 action set pieces in the movie lack clarity and coherence. It starts with Six’s mission in Bangkok, where sweeping drone shots and super-fast cuts try to pass off as slick staging. At no point is the viewer (who, mind you, has no big screen at their disposal this time) fully aware of what character is where, or how someone gets from one point to another. Compare this to the opening Bond sequences, where almost every shot is accounted for in terms of creating a mini-narrative of motion. After Bangkok, there’s the airplane sequence, where Six must fend off a bunch of mercenaries who receive orders to kill him mid-air. On paper, it’s a thrilling concept, like Bane’s intro in The Dark Knight Rises. But the Russo brothers compose this mid-air madness as an inarticulate and garbled series of potentially daring shots. I had no perception of either time, space or pace – which is saying a lot in a sequence where the plane gets damaged, plummets to the ground, all while Six tries to steal the parachute of a falling enemy in the sky. By the end, even the scene taps out, refusing to visually follow through with how Six actually survives: a wry cut ensures that we suddenly see him making a phone call from the ground, all gasping and bruised, but in one piece.

The 9-minute Prague sequence – which culminates in a chase across downtown Prague featuring exploding cars, trams and landmarks – is the stale cherry on the messy cake. I like movies that go all out with their violence. But this scene is virtually impossible to follow for all the same reasons. It’s mostly a blur of faceless metal crunching, fire and bullets. The intent – as in most MCU movies – is to blow the viewer away with noise, velocity and scale. But in The Gray Man, the viewer feels a lot like the collateral damage: hapless, dazed, confused. Every camera angle and cut adds to the motion sickness. Ditto for the final face-off in a European mansion, where the niece is held hostage and Six comes to rescue her. That it’s shot at night only adds to our woes. There are not enough wide shots to even establish broad locations and timeframes. The drone shots get particularly annoying. Eventually, all we’re left with is the sound of money being thrown on the wall. At some point, the money will run out of ways to stick.

Rahul Desai is a film critic and programmer, who spends his spare time travelling to all the places from the movies he writes about.

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