Coming in hot with a budget of over $US200 million US dollars – and the most expensive Netflix production ever is the new comedy action thriller The Gray Man, from the Russo Brothers (Anthony and Joseph), the directing team behind Marvel’s Infinity War series - the one that killed off half the universe and then brought everyone back.
Now, $US200 million is an awful lot of scratch by anyone’s standards so I was surprised to discover how ordinary looking so much of The Gray Man was.
Maybe it’s a result of that inflation I keep hearing about.
Chris Evans plays the sociopathic private security contractor Lloyd Hansen in the Netflix comedy-thriller The Gray Man. Photo: Netflix
There are a couple of very big set-pieces that clearly look to have destroyed an awful lot of vehicles, but long sections of it are studio bound conversations, or people staring screens yelling “I need a status update” or “take the damn shot”!
Ryan Gosling plays Six, a shadow recruit into an off-the-books CIA assassination program called Sierra. In prison for murder, he’s discovered by Billy Bob Thornton and made an offer he can’t refuse.
The Sierra program is not universally well regarded in the spook community evidently, and eighteen years after his recruitment Six is about to become the only one left. After completing a contract on a bloke he then discovers is Sierra Four, Six is given a McGuffin – a thumb drive with evidence of malfeasance at the highest level of the agency. How high? To the top.
Now he has the full weight of the agency after him and that drive. His only advantage is that he officially doesn’t exist – no file, not even a name.
The CIA bad guys need reinforcements, so they go to the private sector, a sociopathic security expert named Lloyd Hansen, played with glee and a Village People moustache by Captain America, Chris Evans.
His first stop: Billy Bob Thornton who is now in forced retirement and in Azerbaijan.
And so, begins a chase across the globe with our man Six followed by Hansen and his various gangs of mercenaries. Bangkok, Istanbul, Monaco, Vienna, Berlin, London, Hong Kong, Prague, Washington DC, a castle in Croatia – some of those places the production actually went to.
While he’s on the run Six takes beatings and shootings every which way including inside a Thai fireworks display, falling out of a crashing plane, trapped in the basement of a forger’s apartment, in the grounds of the aforementioned Croation castle and – light rail promoters in Auckland and Wellington take note – on a tram in Prague.
He is glibly indestructible it would appear – and the film shares that glibness AND its indestructability. The Russos just keep throwing stuff at it and somehow it doesn’t sink.
The easiest thing to do here is to describe The Gray Man in terms of other, better, films. It has the globetrotting scope of Bond, the one man against a corrupt dark state of the Bourne films, the punchy balletic action of John Wick.
But it doesn’t execute as well as any of those (except perhaps that Prague tram chase). The dialogue is hackneyed and clichéd, except for Evans occasionally witty banter as Hansen.
There’s a huge cast of usually very able performers, struggling with limited characterisations to be mined in the script by the Russos and their regular collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.
Ana de Armas – soon to be seen as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s biography Blonde – Alfre Woodard as the retired station chief Margaret Cahill, one of the handsomest stars in world cinema Wagner Moura under a bunch of makeup as the forger Laszlo and Tamil superstar Dhanush all do their best but there’s just not enough there for them.
The Gray Man has been in development for over a decade – from when Brad Pitt was supposed to play the Ryan Gosling part – and there are a series of ten books by Mark Greaney that can be turned into a franchise and if any studio can pull that off it would be Netlix.
After all, their metrics are very different from a normal Hollywood studio. Their priority is minutes watched and if they can arrest their slide in subscriber numbers with big star exclusive material like this it makes some sense.
The Netflix annual production and acquisition budget is now $US20 billion so they can probably afford it.
And here I am talking more about the business than the film and that’s your biggest problem, right there.
The Gray Man is rated M for violence, offensive language and cruelty and you might find it in odd sessions at select cinemas but most audiences will find it streaming on Netflix now.
