Asher Luberto
In the Grey is marketed as a movie from the director of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but really, it should be marketed as a movie from the director of last year’s Fountain of Youth. A tale of two halves, Guy Ritchie started his career with a slew of prolific, propulsive, inventive gangster flicks overflowing with energy like an overpoured pint of beer, dripping around the edges with macho creativity in the best possible way. In the 2000’s, a new Ritchie movie was greeted with the same wonderful importance as a new Scorsese film. But the beer’s gone flat and the formula’s gone stale. Even a pint of Coors gets old after you’ve had ten of them.
As a pair of well-dressed, heavy-drinking gentlemen quip their way through a heist centered around breezy locations, playful insults, convoluted twists, and femme fatales who pull the rug out from under them incessantly, you get the sense you’ve seen this before. It’s the same format as Ritchie’s entire late-career oeuvre, ranging from The Gentleman to Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Every Ritchie movie needs a heist, a chase, a warble of indecipherable accents, and a litany of even more indecipherable plot points — in this case, a bunch of extras discussing the tortuous heist machinations, distracting from the charming leads at the center of the film.
Eiza González in “In the Grey.” (Black Bear)
Played by Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal, respectively, Sid and Bronco are mercenaries hired to recover billions of dollars given to the wrong people. Existing in a moral grey zone between legality and criminality, they are great at what they do, but what they do isn’t always great, morally speaking. They meet with Rachel (Eiza González), who’s been tasked with setting up a mission to recover the money from a war criminal named Manny (Carlos Bardem), an elderly scumbag who puts the dick in “dictator.” They embark on a country-spanning chase without stakes (there’s never any sense they aren’t going to pull this off), and are launched into a hurricane of close-quarter fights, motorbike chases through cobblestone roads, and perfunctory bad guys who pile up like store-folded clothes, all while our suave heroes crack wise while cracking necks.
It can be easy to get swept away by the unrelenting action, unreliable narrators and elegantly luxurious locations — Ritchie still has undeniable swagger and bravado in spades. But with further inspection, you’ll realize this is just a derivative rehash of Ritchie’s recent output, just with a different cast of characters and a slightly different way of blowing things up. While hamfisted storylines can be forgiven, especially in the action genre, the bland exposition and frantic globetrotting are so jumbled, it can’t be ignored. It’s true action can outweigh unbelievable characters and incoherent subplots in the espionage genre — who cares if a movie is messy when your jaw is on the floor from head-spinning, pulse-pounding ballets of bombast — but as with recent Ritchie films, you’d need a road map to follow all the jumbled moving pieces.
Cavill is predictably fantastic as a linen-wearing agent who wears his machismo on his tailored sleeve. The banter he has with Gyllenhaal about their homoerotic bromance is easily the highlight of the film. Gyllenhaal’s character, a gruffer, more talkative agent of chaos, carries playful compliments in his back pocket like a holstered gun, always at the ready with a quip about Cavill’s outfits and muscles. They have palpable sexual tension, and fans of Gyllenhaal’s Brokeback Mountain might find themselves rooting for these two hunks to kiss already, but this ain’t that type of movie. Instead, this is another silly, wordy, bloody heist flick from a director who has forgotten how to steal your money without you noticing it.