The Gray Man (2022)

Directed by Anthony & Joe Russo. Starring Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Billy Bob Thornton, Julia Butters, Jessica Henwick, Regé-Jean Page, Alfre Woodard, Dhanush, Wagner Moura. [PG-13]

Appropriately-named action thriller is a colorless affair, no matter how hard the filmmakers try to jazz things up with slick camera movements and incendiary action scenes, such as a fight set among dozens of active firework mortars, but nothing pops off the screen, and no set piece lingers in the bloodstream or brainpan. Gosling doesn’t get much breathing room as a generic CIA assassin, modeled as a Jason Bourne-wannabe with the sort of clenched, enigmatic stoicism the actor tried to tap into in Only God Forgives, who goes through the expected nigh-invincible-operative-on-the-run motions in a perfunctory story bogged down by the same old “shadow government stuff” we’ve seen time and time again. Evans is the rogue antagonist, a wisecracking weasel who’s been written and acted in such a self-consciously loony fashion, it’s hard to see him as a serious threat even when he starts yanking out a torture victim’s fingernails. There’s no sense of real stakes, no compelling reason to care about anything that happens (even to the supporting characters whose tragic fates are practically tattooed to their foreheads), and hardly a single genre cliché gets ignored: a threatened child, a lackluster Macguffin, every opponent being exactly as incompetent as the scene requires (even to the point where observers comment about it), but at least we’re spared a lazy love interest. Unoriginality, however, almost comes with the territory; its greatest sin is just how drab the movie looks from end to end, a victim of low-light photography that makes everything look synthetic, and computer-generated effects and “fills” that are sub-standard even if you ignore the grossly inflated budget—just look at a chaotic skirmish aboard a deteriorating plane, which quickly turns into an “animated” blur where nothing matters at all. Shea Whigham has a small role.

44/100