Russo Brothers' "THE GRAY MAN"
Review by Dennis D. McDonald
“If you are putting together a film festival to display Americans as negatively as possible you can probably make THE GRAY MAN your flagship screening.”
As summer popcorn moview go this is a decent film. The action scenes are well done, the acting is excellent, and things move along at a very brisk clip.
Still, I had some qualms.
First is the unbelieveability of most situations. We’re accustomed to heroes doing impossible things (see Tom Cruise) but the implausibility of some ridiculously over the top violent scenes — and the unrelentingly increasing body count — caused me to roll my eyes quite a bit. That sort of takes the edge off any sense of real danger that should be apparent.
Second was a thin plot built around a classic McGuffin situation where everyone is trying to get a miniature thumb drive containing Incriminating Encrypted Data. Come on folks — who keeps so much incriminating evidence on one device without making a reconstructable backup? OK — I know we’re supposed to suspend disbelief, but I still think Arnie’s pursuit of the computer files at the beginning of Cameron’s 1994 TRUE LIES was more tense and dramatic. And entertaining.
Third was the amount of travel involved. OK, I admit that it was a good thing for local economies all over to have money dumped around but after a while I totally lost track of where we were — and that was despite the regular display of locations and time frames reminiscent of title cards in old silent films.
Fourth, we have here one more example of “CIA and Americans As Bad Guys.” I know Chris Evans portrayed a “rogue agent” but the CIA “insiders” weren’t much better. If you are putting together a film festival to display Americans as negatively as possible you could probably make THE GRAY MAN your flagship screening.
That said, I did not fall asleep and was only occasionally bored. Many of the scenes are a bit dark for my taste and after a while the bloodless body count becomes tiresome. But I can’t argue about the production quality. The acting is uniformly excellent and the surround sound track quite impressive. But I don’t think I’ll be watching this one again.
Review copyright (c) 2022 by Dennis D. McDonald