Netflix, Netflix, Netflix… where do we even begin.
First and foremost, and getting straight to the point, the plot was light. It’s a simple one, where a CIA ‘bad guy’ (Ryan) is running from a mercenary (Chris) hired by his former boss (Regé) who is hunting him down because he has damning information about said boss and the CIA that can’t be released to the broader public.
Unfortunately, there was absolutely no depth to this film… it was just action sequence after action sequence, with no real time given to building the characters or getting to know their motivations. It was also slow getting started… twenty five minutes into this film, and one still could not understand why the CIA was after Ryan’s character or the significance of the information he had against Regé’s character. Honestly, it was really hard to care for these characters and the movie. In my view, if the film gave a more substantive reason behind why it was important for Regé’s character to want to kill Ryan’s character aside from the simple, he did something bad he didn’t want other people to know, than it would have been a better film.
In terms of characters, this film had the opportunity to be fantastic. Frankly, they had an ensemble cast that other productions can only dream of. But even with charismatic performances by both Chris and Ryan and the likes of Billy Bob Thornton and Alfre Woodard included in this film, all of the characters were unfortunately not memorable and you couldn’t root for them in this film. You will note that throughout this review, I don’t use the actual name of the characters but rather refer to the actor. It is honestly because the characters overall fell flat.
Taking a deeper dive…
We all know that both Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling are phenomenal actors and master’s of their art… but no matter how much they tried, even they could not breathe life into the under-developed characters they were given. It goes to show you, no matter how great the talent, actors can’t do anything with a mediocre script.
Regé, as we all know as well, is an exceptional talent. For the screen time he was given, he played his role exceptionally well and was very believable. But again, at the end of the movie, I was left feeling like where does his character go from here…
Ana De Armas in this role was unfortunately bland. She was not exciting or magnetic to watch and failed to convince me as a viewer as to why she really wanted to help Ryan’s character aside from maybe she didn’t really like her boss or maybe it was that she really wanted to be taken seriously in her career… either way, her performance was monotone, and although she did well with the physicality of the role and nailing the stunts [some of them, as we all know these actors have stunt doubles], her performance was underwhelming.
Alfre Woodard and Billy Bob Thornton tried to bring a level of depth to the film, but I feel like their time was way to short and the writers and directors did not use these great talents to their full capabilities.
Dhanush’s character was a great surprise. He was excellent in that he was able to portray a ruthless assassin in an honourable way, and that is hard to do, especially given the amount of screen time he was given, which is especially why I appreciated the performance.
But as we discuss honour and levels of morality in Dhanush’s character, it begs the question given it’s title, The Gray Man, no characters outside of Dhanush, straddled the morality line in a way that would give this film credit to it’s namesake. For the most part, the characters started one way in the movie and ended the same way… again no changing character arc or character development. It was very black and white. A good script and a good plot would have paid attention to this – again character development – and it would have made a big difference regarding the story line for the film.
Finally, I want to make a quick note of the dialogue… the writer’s used ‘your boy’ so often, it really just got annoying. I almost turned off the film and found this to be lazy writing…
Cinematography and Editing
For a film with all the possible resources available to it, I felt like there were moments when the film got blurry. I had to rewind to make sure it wasn’t my television, which is a 4K HD Curved TV by the way, or an issue with my Netflix connection. A clear example of this was the scene where Ryan jumps out of the plane. Also, there were a number of fight scenes that felt really choppy, such as the fights scene at the hospital with Ryan, Ana and Dhanush’s characters.
Sound and Score
At thirty minutes into the movie, you could tell that the music sounded like a direct steal from the Mission Impossible franchise. This was also the case at approximately one hour and thirty one minutes into the film… where I heard another Mission Impossible theme knock off. Honestly, if you have this type of budget and resources, you can take the time to create an epic original music score for the film, especially for a film the Russo Brothers say they want to franchise.
The Gray Man
Promotion
The actual promotion of this film was all over the place. Specifically, the promotion material centered around Ryan, Chris and Ana. I found it very odd that Regé was MIA in many of the promotion materials. He should’ve been more front and centre, especially given that the entire reason for this film is that Regé’s character hire’s Chris’s character to hunt and kill Ryan’s character.
Even more odd to me during the press junkets were the pairings. For example, although Ana and Ryan are together in the movie and they are on the same team, they rarely did press together. Most of the time, Ana did press with Chris, and her character does not encounter Chris’s character at all in the film. If anything, Ana should’ve been paired with Ryan since they were together most of the movie or better yet, Ryan be paired with Chris more… Also, I feel like Ryan should’ve been more front and centre… Another person we barely got to see was Jessica Henwick, not in the film promotion or in the press junkets. That is a shame given that she played a major role in the end by killing Chris’s character.
Finally, the worst part of this promotion is that they decided to only have a one week exclusive theatrical release – if anything give it longer to see if the ticket sales could recoup some of the cost of this very expensive movie… with strategies like this, it makes me wonder who was in charge of promotion… it was disappointing to see such a lack of strategy and going forward, Netflix needs to get serious about it’s marketing for films on it’s platforms.
Ticket Sales and Other Reviews
According to one Article, The Gray Man had abysmal ticket sales for the film’s showings at The Paris Theatre in NYC. At time of writing, The Gray Man had grossed $360,776 worldwide at the box office… and that was across 500 theaters. Now, it is expected that with a film that will eventually go to streaming, many people will wait to see that film at home on their regular subscription. But when you actually do a bit of math and understand that the film was available at all those theaters, those numbers will make anyone cringe… they basically had no ticket sales at all. No name indie films have better ticket sales at film festivals.
Now, in addition to bad ticket sales, the critic reviews were horrible and as I write the article, the critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes stand at 46%. However, we all know, we can’t only look at critics… what do they know?!? Ultimately, if the audience enjoys the film, then that’s what matters… but even in Rotten Tomatoes, although the verified audience score sits at 91%, there are only 100+ verified reviews, i.e. those who reviewed this film who bought a ticket. What someone really wants to look at is the “All Audience Rating” which for this film stands at 68% for 2500+ views for those who streamed it. On IMDB the ratings stand at 6.5 and Metascore stand at 49.
These statistics are horrible… It makes one wonder how many people actually watched the film [not just views which include replays] and whether or not this film led to any additional subscribers… Although we know that Netflix will never divulge that information, if I were an executive, I’d wonder whether the strategy for paying massive amounts of money for mediocre film is sustainable. According to experts on The Wrap, they’ve indicated to studios and streamers to reign in those budgets… as winter is coming… and Wall Street does not believe it is a sustainable model either, but clearly that advice has not been heeded by Netflix as a sequel featuring Ryan Gosling is in the works.
I can tell you though, as a subscriber and someone who loves art, it makes me cringe to see this type of spending for such sub par cinema or content as many would call it… and the fact that they are looking to do this again… it’s no surprise to me that Netflix has lost 200,00 Subscribers in Q1 of this year, and another 1,000,000 Subscribers in Q2. Based on these lost subscriptions, I think a number of people cringed as well and are tired of paying for mediocre content!
Final Thoughts
This was not a great film… it wasn’t even an OK film… honestly, it was a tough film to get through and if it was not for writing this review, I would have just stopped watching and stopped numbing my brain. Netflix, please do better!
Grade: 2/5
