Netflix wants The Gray Man to be everything. Film, television, spin-offs, sequels — this is supposed to be Netflix’s answer to Bond. No expense was spared. It has some of the hottest actors. A gargantuan budget gives the film enormous action set-pieces. Hell, they brought in two of the hottest blockbuster filmmakers to direct.
And somehow, all this ended up as a less interesting version of Burn Notice, the late-2000s USA Network TV series.
“What do you know about the Sierra Program?”
An unnamed prisoner (Ryan Gosling) is recruited by Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton), a CIA spook, to become a special kind of operator. Completely off books, Gosling will become Sierra Six.
Years pass. Fitzroy has retired, and been replaced with the callow, corrupt Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page). Carmichael wants to end the Sierra program, but he also wants to use it to perform his most brutal kills. But when Six refuses to perform a messy hit due to civilian casualties, he finds himself in possession of a drive containing evidence of Carmichael’s corruption. Unfortunately, Carmichael is already suspicious, and Six knows it. So Six goes rogue.
Carmichael hires an off-books contractor named Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans) to track Six down by any means necessary. Unfortunately for him, Hansen is a sociopath thrilled at the opportunity for a blank check from the CIA, and he takes to the job with gusto. Fortunately, Six isn’t on his own. After Carmichael benches Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), a gifted agent in her own right, she joins with Six to clear her own name. Together, Six and Dani travel the world, evading Hansen’s hitmen while trying to rescue Fitzroy and his niece (Julia Butters).
“Reckless mystery men you guys send in when you can’t officially send anyone else.”
Hopefully, the Burn Notice comparison makes sense to the eight of you out there who remember the show. Both are stories about burned spies hunted by their own agencies, aided by a sexy, violent companion and an older mentor figure, who has to make do without the resources normally at their disposal while they try to clear their name and learn to do the right thing. They are, fundamentally, both underdog stories. How can one man go against a massive institutional power without any of the resources normally at his disposal?
Part of what made Burn Notice work, dramatically, was that it leaned into this dynamic. The lead was often confronting technologically superior foes using duct-tape and cardboard. Because of this, the show wasn’t just dramatically satisfying, it worked within its own limitations. Lacking the resources, to have pricey set-pieces and massive explosions, Burn Notice made do with smaller, off-brand solutions. Working within limitations can provide interesting results.
The Gray Man has no limitations. It is meant to be a Big Movie. Netflix pumps out a lot of content, most of it intended to look like recognizable facsimiles of something popular. But they rarely attempt to make a real blockbuster. The Gray Man is supposed to be that. And yet, for much of the runtime, I wished I was watching a relatively low-budget basic cable TV show. Not even a prestige drama.
Because when you don’t have the money for big action set pieces, you have to improvise. The Princess, Hulu’s recent action release, made up for a miniscule budget by severely limiting the locations and props and focusing on inventive fight choreography. It was tight, controlled, considered. The Gray Man chops its action up beyond recognition. It’s kinetic, but it’s kinetic in the way that that famous Tak3n clip where they cut 40 times to show Liam Neeson hopping over a fence is kinetic. The action is often unreadable. Compare this to something like RRR, or even smaller Netflix action flicks like Gunpowder Milkshake, Kate, or Extraction, and there’s no contest.
Unfortunately, The Gray Man absolutely fails as an underdog story. Six is the absolute best at what he does. He’s the coolest, the drollest, the fastest, and sharpest. He knows it. The people hunting him know it. His allies know it. And it just doesn’t work. Heroes in underdog stories need to show weakness. They need to be outclassed. In the Russo brothers Marvel movies, they understood this. There’s a reason why, for instance, Infinity War opens with Thanos defeating Thor and Hulk. It lets them reposition the powerful, confident heroes from previous movies as underdogs.
You can’t really do that in a spy thriller. One guy with a gun feels equally threatening as three guys with guns. The opening of The Gray Man establishes that Gosling is the best of the best. And throughout the movie, it’s not like Gosling’s enemies were coming at him with anything particularly high tech. He had a gun; they had guns. What’s fascinating is that the villain is given carte blanche with CIA assets — and he just hires more gunmen. Which isn’t bad if you want a lot of anonymous goons to bite it, but isn’t exactly thrilling either.
How do you take a story like this, about a guy trying to stay anonymous as he hunts down a CIA-sanctioned psychopath, and not have anything to say about the surveillance state? Where are the drones? The international legal fuckery? The Gray Man feels old. Older than Enemy of the State, older than Mission: Impossible. And there’s no real reason for it. Leaning into the omnipresence of the international intelligence infrastructure would let Six be the underdog. But it would also involve saying something, anything, and the movie is chronically averse to that.
So, The Gray Man doesn’t have great action set pieces. It does have a great cast. Ryan Gosling is effortlessly charming in his first role in four years. But his droll underdelivery needs someone more high energy to bounce off. This dynamic worked like gangbusters in The Nice Guys, for instance. Instead, he has Ana de Armas. Now, de Armas is enormously talented. I have liked her in every role I’ve seen her in. But she’s going for exactly the same kind of stoic ‘operator’ badass that Gosling is, just more serious. Billy Bob Thornton? Also pretty reserved. Chris Evans is the only one who seems to be bringing a little life to his role. Unfortunately, that role is as a one-note psychopath. Only so much he can do with that. God bless him, though, at least he tries.
“Gray men.”
I knew The Gray Man was in trouble when, just a little ways in, the movie stopped dead for a flashback. See, rather than a cat-and-mouse game between two spies, The Gray Man ends up being about Six trying to rescue a little girl. So the movie figures, we need to know who this little girl is and why Six cares. We don’t, because the film already established that he was unwilling to endanger children, but whatever. Thus begins an interminable flashback sequence to Six meeting his handler’s niece.
This is because, I suspect, The Gray Man is in a bit of a pickle. Spy thrillers thrive on either nationalism or cynicism. You can be representing your country in the Great Game, or you can be fleeing from your country’s corruption. But, again, this would involve saying anything. And the Russos want to avoid that. So instead, the movie ties itself into knots. These are the good off-book assassins; those are the bad ones. These are the corrupt CIA handlers; those are the noble ones.
So instead of a spy, Six is a superhero. It’s what the Russos know how to do. But because he keeps assassinating people, they have to have him save the cat, and then save it again and again. Just like we can never forget that Six is the coolest guy in the room, the movie wants to make sure we never forget that he’s a softie at heart. He, like his film, should be all things to all people.
In a way, Burn Notice was too generous a comparison. The Gray Man reminds me more of McDonalds. It is an approximation of something you love, meant to tide you over when you’re too tired for anything else. It won’t fill you up. You won’t remember the experience. Instead, you eat it, only partially aware, while driving, or cleaning, or gaming. This is the The Gray Man.
This is content.