In the Grey is in theaters now.
The old adage “the worst thing you can be is boring” is very much underlined with In the Grey, a deathly dull would-be action thriller that feels three times the length of its 97-minute run time.
Though Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal get top billing, the film’s true lead is Eiza González. She plays Rachel Wild, a lawyer whose opening voiceover explains the film’s title in explicit detail, as she talks about how she operates within both legal and illegal and moral and amoral parameters and, yep, outright says she works “in the grey” because that’s just the kind of movie it is.
The film’s paper- thin plot finds Rachel using her skills and the elite team – and bottomless resources and finances – at her disposal to target Salazar (Carlos Bardem), the crime lord who’s stolen a fortune Rachel is tasked with getting back by any means necessary. Her two best agents are Sid (Cavill) and Bronco (Gyllenhaal), who head up the aforementioned illegal side of her operation, using all sorts of tactics to trick, track and hunt those Rachel needs dealt with.
The opening scenes of In the Grey feel very cliche but also don’t stand out as notably bad or unwatchable, as they set the stage for the story, though it does stand out how much González’s voiceover is used to explain how both her job and her larger team works. But as the film continues, it becomes egregious how much the film stays in the same mode it opens in, as it tells, not shows, over and over and over again.
A classic part of a heist or espionage movie is a “this is how our plan will play out” sequence, where we hear how everything is supposed to go for the team’s big operation – often using VO alongside shots of the locations targeted – and get the lay of the land before, inevitably, something goes awry. And those sequences can be super fun and are an appreciated part of the genre. But writer-director Guy Ritchie seems to have the mistaken belief that it would be really fun if a movie was nearly entirely made up of those sorts of sequences, hammering home the technique into monotony.
It is truly maddening how much of this movie is composed of voiceovers from either González or Gyllenhaal explaining what’s going on right now and/or what’s supposed to happen next. It’s not just hand-holding to an extreme degree, it feels lazy and as though Ritchie just didn’t want to figure out any other way to include exposition and simply wasn’t interested in any sort of characterization or personal dynamics, so he skipped as much normal dialogue and character interaction as possible.
Rachel is fierce and shrewd and she’s a shark and… that’s it. There are no other nuances to what we learn about her after what is made quite clear the first few minutes. But that’s better than Sid and Bronco, who are simply there to be generically smart and badass, with zero other layers or reasons to care about them. There is almost nothing in these roles for Cavill and Gyllenhaal to do but glower and yell stock lines about sticking to the plan and getting to the rendezvous point. Given their dueling dullness, it’s curious why these two characters weren’t simply made into one, since there’s so little to make them feel different from one another except that one is British and one is American.
The same goes for their larger team, which includes dudes with names like Baker (Kojo Attah) and Gucci (Jason Wong). Everyone is stoic and super capable, but lacks anything that makes them distinct in personality or skillset. There’s no wit, no charm, and no cool touches for any of these guys.
A film like this usually gets mileage out of how a team of this sort has to improvise and pivot when things go wrong, but this group seem too good and too prepared to ever make things interesting because they really just seem prepared for literally anything. Most of the time, they don’t seem two steps ahead of their enemies, they seem 20 steps ahead, and coupled with them being blank slates, personality-wise, it makes watching them operate boring, no matter how many nameless thugs they shoot or get in car chases with.
Ritchie has had some big highs and lows in his career, and in recent years has been making a lot of movies very quickly that are mostly forgettable. But he’s never made one as dull as In the Grey. It especially stands out that he’s re-teaming with frequent collaborator Cavill here, given these guys have much much livelier – if uneven – films together, like The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
As mentioned, Cavill and Gyllenhaal truly have nothing to work with here, performance-wise, while the naturally likeable González is fine but feels miscast. Though in her mid-30s, she still reads fairly young onscreen in both looks and demeanor, and doesn’t feel like she quite embodies someone meant to be the experienced and dominant leader – her team uses the codename “Mom” for her – as Rachel is intended to be. This is underlined by the presence of Rosamund Pike in a few scenes as a rival of Rachel, given Pike effortlessly exudes the energy Rachel is meant to and feels like she’d be the better casting choice for the role.
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