In India, especially Tamil Nadu, Russo Brothers’ The Gray Man, now on Netflix after a short theatrical run, will hold a special attraction because of actor Dhanush. But he has just a minuscule role of about 15 minutes in the film’s runtime of two hours. It is just a wink, but he does make a mark.
As a paid assassin, Avik San, trying to kill Ryan Ghosling’s Sierra Six, the “ Tamil friend” (as another character fondly addresses him) has nothing much to give. It is an action-packed sequence, but he has managed to clinch a role infused with a high moral message: “Are you going to kill a girl”, he seems distressed. And at the end, he gives away the pen drive with incriminating evidence against the CIA, quipping “I do not need the money, these are not good men”. I am sure he must have been inundated with a flood of congratulatory messages from his fans. How did he manage to get these profound lines (scripted by Joe Russo, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely from a book with the same title by Mark Greaney), I really wonder, because this has been his scoring point in Tamil cinema.
But The Gray Man is not about Dhanush; it is about ruthless killing, double crossing and saving one’s skin with Six – a convict hired by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to be among its group of cold-blooded killers – becoming inconvenient after he stumbles upon a deadly secret that will place a lot of heads on the block. So, the Agency hires Chris Evans’ Lloyd Hansen to capture Six. Hansen is a psychopathic murderer, who enjoys torturing people, and some of the scenes show him as a virtual monster. Thrown into all this is a kidnap drama with a teenage girl, her heart pumping with the aid of a pacemaker, held hostage.
And this is pretty much the plot, and the directors could not have been unaware that The Gray Man is a bit of Shooter, a bit of John Wick and Jason Bourne. Yawn, yawn. Also, unlike the last James Bond adventure (No Time To Die) in which we see 007 (played by Daniel Craig) is mortal after all – vividly signalling the end of an era (with some talk now about having a female Bond, though this is being opposed) Six may well have nine lives. There could be sequels.
If the narrative style with its action-packed uniformity did not grip me, the performances were not anything to talk about. Gosling was good in The Notebook and La La Land, but now seems to be wanting to step into the shoes of the legendary French actor, Alain Delon – as a kind of Hollywood version. Gosling’s earlier charisma (in Crazy Stupid Love) has disappeared; instead, he plays a man sans emotion, poker faced and wooden. Yes, that is what the role is about, but that is wasting a talent.
It is not pretty much different with Ana de Armas; she was splendid in Sergio as a United Nations officer and as a nurse to a family patriarch in Knives Out (styled on an Agatha Christie work). But getting into fast-paced thrillers like No Time To Die and The Gray Man appears to have impeded her splendid performance arc. Like Gosling, she is wasted. And Rege-Jean Page, who was compelling in the Regency-era drama, Bridgerton, plays an Agency boss, but sinks into the shadows, largely because of an underwhelmingly written part.
In the final analysis, The Gray Man comes as a shallow piece of celluloid work which hardly goes beyond gun duels and bouts of desperate fights that get awfully jaded much before midway.
