In the Grey ☆☆

Starring: Henry Cavill, Jake
Gyllenhaal, Eiza González, Fisher Stevens, Carlos Bardem and Rosamund Pike

Directed by: Guy Ritchie

For a while, In the Grey attempts something you wouldn’t expect to find in a typical shoot-’em-up action film: It turns into a process movie. Instead of offering up the kind of chaotic, off-the-cuff violence that something like the John Wick films work hard to sell, In the Grey meticulously details infiltration and extraction plans conceived by a pair of elite operatives, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill. Not only that, considerable time is spent on their boss, a cunning recovery specialist (Eiza González) who targets shady criminals on behalf of shadier clients, doing things like forensic accounting and filing court orders to apply pressure to those in her crosshairs. It might sound boring; it’s actually the best and most original part of the movie.

The problem with In the Grey is that, aside from this surprising focus on how action heroes do their jobs when they’re not actually shooting guns at people, there’s not much else of note happening here. Certainly not with Gyllenhaal and Cavill, who aren’t allowed to have a hint of personality past “well-trained field agent.” And the kinetic visual style that livens up in director Guy Ritchie’s best films is largely absent here, as In the Grey eventually evolves into a generic actioner that frustratingly forgets that watching action movies is supposed to be a fun endeavour.

In In the Grey (not to be confused with Liam Neeson’s 2011 The Grey), González’s Rachel Wild is tasked with recouping $1 billion that was swindled from a shady corporate entity led by an underused Rosamund Pike. The money was taken by a foreign despot named Salazar (Carlos Bardem), who’s set up with his own private militia on his own private island. While Rachel uses her legal cunning to apply the screws to Salazar’s personal lawyer (Fisher Stevens), Rachel’s two best boys, Sid (Cavill) and Bronco (Gyllenhaal), assemble a strike force to infiltrate the island, where Rachel hopes to arrange a meet and greet with Salazar that could lead to a peaceful resolution of the issue. It’s not hard to guess that there’s little chance of that happening. It doesn’t take long before the fellas have to put all that advance planning to use as they attempt to rescue Rachel and take down Salazar.

Again, most of the fun here is in the set-up, as Sid and Bronco elaborately plan out extraction sites, create trap-filled escape routes and figure out the best way to navigate an island teeming with bad guys. The script, which Ritchie wrote himself, is at its best when it dives into the details and shows how escaping enemy territory filled with trained soldiers who want to kill you isn’t quite as simple as Arnold Schwarzenegger used to make it look.

Unfortunately, there’s not much else that In the Grey brings to the table. Cavill and Gyllenhaal are as stiff as boards, essentially sharing a personality and seemingly not permitted to bring even a hint of charm or personalities to their roles.

The liveliest they get is one dryly remarking “I love you” to the other or referring to his colleague as his “husband” in a deadpan manner which is probably just an oddly placed joke, but who can say, really? We know so little about these characters that all relationship options remain on the table. If you squint, Gyllenhaal does give off vibes that are slightly more unhinged than what Cavill is selling, but the movie constantly reigns him back in and never lets him run with it.

González also struggles to make an impression, as it’s tough to buy her as a hardened negotiator willing to stare down the world’s deadliest criminals without blinking. It’s fun to imagine what it might look like if her and Pike swapped roles, there’s a good chance that version of the movie would have played better. And no one else in the cast matters much.

Bardem plays a standard-issue action-movie villain. The other members of Sid and Bronco’s team are non-entities. Kristofer Hivju, who played the fan-favorite Tormund Giantsbane’s on Game of Thrones, shows up as Salazar’s chief henchman and early in the film, it seems like Ritchie might at least let him cut loose. But he ends up fading into the background like everything else.

I never quite know what to do with Guy Ritchie. His career launched like a rocket in the late ‘90s/early 2000s with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, and though he’s found commercial success at times, his subsequent offerings have rarely matched the quality of his first films. Quite frankly, you can say that about a lot of directors who arrived on the scene with a bang. Since then, he’s worked a lot, rarely going more than a few years without releasing a movie, including five in the last three years with a sixth on the way. Sometimes Ritchie surprises you, like when his vibrant live-action version of Disney’s Aladdin ended up being far better than anyone expected. Other times, he struggles badly with tone, like with 2023’s Jason Statham misfire, Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre.

He seems to want to put his personal stamp on In the Grey. The fact that his writing and directing credit appears overtop of the head of a dead man with blood pouring out of the cranial bullet wound is certainly no accident. And there’s some on-screen text early in the movie (which ranges from a checklist of military-grade supplies to the ingredients for a cocktail) that feels like a directorial flourish. But, at some point, you get the sense he either ran out of money, ran out of heart or ran out of ideas. I’m never one to complain about a 98-minute action movie, but in the end, In the Grey feels rushed. Some extra time could have not only paid off all that planning Sid and Bronco do in more impressive ways, but also given the characters more space to feel like actual characters, as opposed to just standard-issue tough-guy archetypes.

– Courtesy: Collider.com