Watched this last night. Amazing action flick. If you like spy movies with tight action and John Wick, must see. Directed by the Russo Brothers, starring Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling. Dhanush is great in it as well, hope to see more of him in western action cinema.
Gonna disagree strongly, here. It was incredibly generic and really wasted Ryan Gosling's acting talent. Shame, because I was really excited for this movie. Premise is basically Suicide Squad meets Jason Bourne. Convicted criminal(s) get sentences commuted if they completes secret missions the government can't acknowledge - on the way, the protagonist uncovers secrets and now both "good guys" and bad guys are hunting him down for the intel. tl;dr at the end. At the risk of getting on my soapbox, here are my personal pros and cons of the movie, for anyone on the fence about watching it: + All star cast! Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Billy Bob Thornton, Rege-Jean Page, etc. And Chris Evans gets to be somewhat unhinged. + Lots of action and fight sequences - Boring protagonist with no personality. Boring villain (Page). For a superstar CIA employee, all he did throughout the movie was act like he had a stick up his butt and defaulted to sending manpower after Gosling. That's it. No smart manuevering. No high IQ battle of wits. Just a sending of all the men after Gosling. - They should have done a lot more backstory on the Sierra program, even if it means drawing a parallel to the Bourne franchise. - Spoilerish cons: Spoiler - Nothing ever explained fully. So, Gosling was Sierra Six who killed Sierra Four in the opening minutes of the movie. Where / who are the other Sierras? They report to Thornton's character, but were handled by Woodard's character? Why was Sierra Four so willing to give up ALL that information to some random dude, albeit another Sierra, that he's never met before? If he was trained so well, why did Four so brazenly show that he was wearing that gold chain/necklace knowing full well that there are cameras everywhere? tl;dr - if you just want to enjoy a generic action flick and don't want to think too hard, this is the movie for you. Suspend your disbelief.
Was pretty generic but fun. Evans plays a great dumbass villain. Thought Gossling was great. Perfect role for him.
The reviewers HATED this film for some reason. It's like a 39% on rt. I dont get why they hated it so much. it's fun enough. Gossling playing the exact some character he always plays in every movie. I think people hate that character for real (reflected in his box office numbers). I like it though Homie from Bridgerton can't act, man. wow. The Russo Bros might have tanked his whole career with this one. Chris Evans fighting for his life to get away from Cap America.
This. I enjoyed it though and would watch a sequel. I rank it after all of the Bourne movies except the last one where Damon had 4 lines of dialogue.
They hated The Adam Project, a SF time travel flick that I enjoyed very much. Perhaps you have to be a father in order to “get it,” but I don’t think so. I enjoyed The Gray Man, as well. Maybe it’s that Ryan Gossling is this season’s film critic punching bag. Beats me.
I find it interesting when people pick apart action movies like they expected them to be Academy Award nominees. I also think that Netflix gets an undue yet deserved amount of hate because it has put out so much tripe, when it puts out a good movie, there's not a lot of positive bias. I can't disagree that the plot had some holes and some head-scratchers. Some of that may be due to editing for time/pacing or just plain bad script. But the action was top tier. And that's what I'm in it for. As long as the plot and dialogue isn't too bad, I can tolerate it.
i kind of think Feige put a hit out on the Russo Bros for leaving Marvel. Feige is a freaking super villain; wants to prove he can make good films without the Russos. He got his buddies to bomb this movie in the reviews.
yeah Ive been going through a bunch of 90's action films and they are absolutely awful.. and fun. All those 90's films now are cult classics.
Story and acting was C, prob lower if you weren't sold on Chris Evans. Action was an A and would've been worth spending more time at the theaters. There wasn't any noticeable shaky cam or quick cuts in the fighting scenes. Some of the drone shots were interesting but not overdone to the point of being a gimmick. The Russo Bros put a lot of thought into those scenes. They're fun, actually want to put you into it, and didn't cop out on the visuals. I don't remember half of the movie since I watched it last week, but I wouldn't mind watching the set pieces again.
The drone shots were something new to me. They were unique and not overdone. I thought they added some cool to the action sequences. The train action sequence was pretty good. I will watch the sequel.
I already said, if you turn your brain off before the movie starts, you're going to have a good time, probably. But when you put Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas, Billy Bob Thornton, Alfre Woodard and Chris Evans all in the same movie, advertise the movie as much as Netflix advertises movies, and it's directed by the Russo Brothers, you expect it to be decent in terms of plot and pacing. Action notwithstanding. The budget for the movie was 200 million dollars, lmao. Like, why? You wasted Gosling, Thornton and Woodard. Huge budget + well-known actors + well-known directors should equate to a pretty damn good movie, but instead, we got whatever The Gray Man was. I wouldn't be this level of nitpicky if it was any combination of random D-tier actors no one's ever heard of and a director who's helming their first film.
I mentioned to my wife that this should have been a theatrical release. I would have preferred it there. We have a 65" TV with good sound but it just doesn't compare to the theatre experience.
I got your whole review and saw your disclaimer and agree with it. It's still just an action flick regardless of actors. And I didn't expect much due to marketing, I mean, what is Netflix supposed to do? As I posed, the majority of the stuff they put out are stinkers. Or maybe they're making films for a broader audience in Asia and Europe, which has different expectations for action- it seems like those markets are all about thin plot, big stars and lots of explosions, which this had in spades. Action movies rarely touch those rare A-tire movies like The Matrix, Gladiator, etc. I tend to be pleasantly surprised when the plot is great, too.
I just expected more from the movie, is all. If you're just grading based off action, it's at least a B+, for sure. Thought it was going to be better than it was, in terms of everything else. It's why I didn't bother with critic reviews for the Transformers movie franchise. I went into the first movie thinking it was going be brainless fun, "hot Megan Fox" and "robot CGI with lots of stuff being blown up bc Michael Bay" and was not disappointed. What I thought was what I got, which wasn't the case with The Gray Man.
