What makes a great action movie? If you were to ask the Russo brothers, veterans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they might tell you that the surest way to enter the pantheon of great action movies is to fill your film with as many drone shots of non-American cities as possible. and then overlay the name of the city, in big, square white letters of course, on each one.
Or at least it’s hard to imagine them offering any other answer after seeing their latest offering, an insanely expensive spy-action thriller called the gray man, which premiered on Netflix this weekend. The film follows Six (Ryan Gosling), a clever and charming CIA assassin with a heart of gold who ends up on the run from his own handlers after they send him on a mission that reveals his world is not what it seems. and blah blah. blah blah blah, honestly who gives a shit? Trying to explain what this movie is about is a complete waste of time because clearly no one who made it cares, so why should you? The movie is a pastiche of plot points and settings pulled from every popular action movie that’s been made in the last 20 years, so if you’ve seen any piece of the Bourne, James Bond, John Wick, or Mission Impossible franchises , you’ve already seen a better version of this movie. There’s a betrayed hero desperately trying to survive as he uncovers the truth, a sexy woman who always has his back, and an endless stream of grim-faced assassins ready to go toe-to-toe with both of them. Of course, there is a precocious child in need of rescuing and lots of banter. God, there is much joke.
There is a different version of this movie where all of that could be forgiven. No one is necessarily looking for a big-budget action movie to reinvent the wheel, and if someone wants to spend a ton of money behind a script that’s been Frankenstein of other entries in the genre and an eminently charming cast, then I say go crazy on that one. It is a taste of garbage that I will not hesitate to drink. Where the gray man fault is not in its lack of originality, but in its rickety construction. Netflix and the Russo Brothers may have created a decent framework for a successful action movie, but then forgot to put a movie in there.
Which brings us back to all those nice drone shots. The characters in this film travel the world at such speed that concepts like time and space cease to matter, and one is left with the distinct impression that the main concern of the people who made this film was to make sure that everyone who Vieran understands how much money it costs to make. There are, I don’t know, a dozen different action scenarios spread across more cities than I care to count, and yet the gray man manages to be one of the most boring movies I’ve seen this year. Each sequence comes and goes, and the next one erases it almost immediately. Any good action spy thriller depends on its sequence; every explosion, gunfight, betrayal, and revelation must be carefully classified and layered in a way that constantly builds tension and momentum. If watching a Mission: Impossible movie is like experiencing a tasting menu, with each course building anticipation for the next, then watch the gray man It’s like having all the trays in an all-you-can-eat buffet dumped on your table at once, to which the Russo brothers walk up and yell: Eat it, little pigs!
Another thing that makes a good action movie is being able to see and understand what’s going on. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film more committed to hiding its action from the audience. All other fight scenes are obscured by smoke from an explosion, smoke from a fire, a blinding sunrise, a strobe flashlight, smoke from a lit flare, and even smoke from a barrage of industrial fireworks. There is fog and mist everywhere, and so many cuts between punches and kicks that I imagine nausea could be a problem for anyone who sees it in a theater. And then there’s the lack of scene editing and composition, which makes it nearly impossible to understand where one character is in relation to the others during the movie’s biggest action sequences. At one point, our villain, Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans), says, “My God, how hard is it to shoot someone?” during a seemingly endless scene in which about 20 armed men shoot Six while he is handcuffed to a bench in a public square. I was wondering the same thing!
What the Russo brothers don’t seem to understand is that it’s not the number of cities our hero steps into, or the number of firefights, or even the size of the explosions that makes a great action movie. It’s the little details. It’s the agonized look that appears on Miles Tellers’ face when the actual fighter plane he’s traveling in hits five G’s; it’s the bloodstains John McClane’s glass-riddled feet leave on a skyscraper window; it’s the brief moment where Tom Cruise pauses to roll his eyes wearily before knocking his adversary through a bathroom wall. These are all things that not only make an action movie feel tactile, but like something that was actually created with a level of care and attention.
In the gray man, the Russo brothers eschewed all attention to detail in favor of more and more amounts of poorly blocked and edited action sequences, each one suffused with a jarring amount of weird CGI (maybe that’s what all the smoke was about). to darken). In the first half hour, you can see Gosling “jump” out of an exploding plane, at which point he transforms into a plastic, stretchy CGI recreation and then, blurred by computer-generated smoke and debris, bounces off the parachute. of a bad guy like a video game character. It all made me feel like I was looking at something that was done the night before, hastily and carelessly. I probably should have turned it off then.