‘The Gray Man’ Review: More of Netflix’s Soulless, Sexless, CGI’d Muzak

Netflix’s $200 million Gray Man is the Muzak of action films: pure background noise as you catch up on emails.

My main takeaway after sitting through 130 minutes of this second-rate CGI is that directors Anthony and Joe Russo, the two guys responsible for four of the highest-grossing movies of all time — Captain America: Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame — have no interest in using their box office clout to step out from under formulaic, corporate movie-making.

If anything, The Gray Man is a leap backward for the Russo boys, something so impersonal, rote, and uninspired that it feels like an over-produced direct-to-video release.

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Michael Bay used his box office clout to deliver 2013’s Pain & Gain, an unheralded masterpiece. Kathryn Bigelow took a big swing and missed with Detroit (2017), but at least she tried. That’s how it’s supposed to work. You give the studios what they want. You deliver a couple of hits. Then you step out and announce yourself. You stick your neck out with something personal, with your golden moment to establish yourself as an auteur.

These guys, man… All the promise of Winter Soldier (still the best Marvel movie) is squandered in another over-CGI’d, bottomless pit of sterile camera swoops and hyper-editing.

The Gray Man’s Gray Man is Ryan Gosling, a convicted murderer recruited as an assassin for the CIA’s Sierra Program. Gosling’s character has a real name but is now known only as Six. Years pass. He does his job. Then he’s sent on a mission to kill a fellow Sierra member who hands him a computer chip containing the kind of dark secrets that will blow something-or-other wide open. The chase is on. Blah, blah, blah.

Gosling tries to emote behind Steve McQueen-cool by shutting Six down emotionally, but nothing can compensate for the 41-year-old’s still boyish face, which doesn’t look half as lived-in as McQueen did at age 30.

Chris Evans is smug and insufferable as Lloyd Hansen; the sociopathic CIA mercenary hired to stop Six.

Wasted entirely is Ana de Armas as Dani, yet another flawless Mary Sue — a sexless, 75-pound girl who can kick a 200-pound man’s butt with just a few moves.

The story is so eager to dazzle us with globe-trotting that we move from city to city before any sense of place is established. Everything is so CGI’d; the only sense you get is that the entire movie was filmed in a Burbank warehouse covered in green screen.

Some of the action scenes are pretty good. So what? There’s nothing here we haven’t seen before. And it’s one action scene after another. Boom-boom-boom, with no let-up, until you zone out.

Unfortunately, this is all we can expect in the Woke Gestapo Era. A romance between Six and Dani might have fleshed out the characters, giving us something to root for, a sense of peril. But that’s no longer allowed. Dani must now be one of the boys. A little eroticism might have added some texture and given us a break from the monotony. Nope. Verboten. What normal people call human nature has been outlawed as sexist or the male gaze or objectification or something.

The only Gray Man scenes that feel anything close to real involve Billy Bob Thornton and Alfre Woodard, two fabulous veterans who can bring humanity to anything. Sure, their characters are walking clichés, but their presence is what matters. Unfortunately, they come and go too quickly—as disposable as the plot.

The Gray Man is based on a series of novels by Mark Greaney, and you can see what Netflix is going for here: its own Russo Brothers franchise, something to stop subscribers from unsubscribing. Well, I’m sure we’ll get all kinds of celebratory press releases from Netflix about “millions of Gray Man minutes streamed,” but those minutes were streamed while the streamer made dinner or responded to emails.

Watching the Gray Man is like standing behind the Russo Brothers, watching them play a video game for two hours.

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