The Gray Man Parent Guide

Off-the-books CIA agent “Six” (Ryan Gosling) has been doing dirty work for the agency since they got his murder sentence commuted and had him released from prison. In that time, he’s become a very dangerous, very valuable asset. But the times they are a-changing, and new management has come in. On his latest hit, Six finds compromising material about some of those new bosses, and rather than turn it in or destroy it, he goes on the run.

Determined to lock down their secrets, the agency appoints an outside contractor unbound by the CIA rulebook, the sociopathic Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans) to kill Six and bring in his info. And while Lloyd has vast resources, little oversight, and no scruples, it’s going to take more than a merciless maniac to bring an experienced operative like Six to ground. A lot more.

The whole film feels vaguely familiar, mostly because it’s playing things very safely. It doesn’t want to step a toe outside the established tropes of the genre, and it succeeds at coloring inside those lines remarkably well. The downside of that caution is that the film tends to feel a little too careful for a fast paced, high intensity action thriller about a rogue secret assassin. Even the torture scenes, while unpleasant, feel pretty rote. Say what you will about Red Sparrow, (and there’s a lot to say about Red Sparrow,) but the torture in that movie was nothing if not mind-searing. Not that I’m endorsing torture – I fervently oppose it – but even with gratuitous torture, The Gray Man fails to stake out its own niche in a market saturated with violent action films.

I suspect that the filmmakers’ hopes to stand out centered primarily on their big budget cast. Gosling, Evans, de Armas, even Billy Bob Thornton are all big names with a lot of screen presence, and that is definitely what keeps the movie from devolving into boredom. You’d think the fight choreography would do that, and it does…sometimes. Some scenes are exactly the kind of kinetic, dramatic mayhem you’d want, and others are just a blurry mess.

On violence alone, I’d lump this flick a lot closer to an “R” rating than the PG-13 it received, but since the directors played it pretty safe with the cussing, the film squeaks in under the line. Parents will likely be less enthused by how close the come to crossing toe that line. Repeated stabbings, shootings, and at least one exceedingly nasty burn all make this grisly fare for younger viewers. For older genre fans, The Gray Man is a reasonably exciting, if familiar, globe-trotting action romp which happily glosses over the geopolitical realities of blowing up large areas of foreign cities in favor of high-intensity action sequences. And in this genre, they’re hardly alone in that choice.