![]() Take a little of “Shooter,” a lot of “John Wick,” add a dash of Jason Bourne, shaken (but not stirred) into the license-to-kill formula, and you’ve got the basic idea. There’s nothing terribly original about the storytelling. From the start, Fitzroy made clear that he was “disposable.” Once Six realizes his contract is up, he calls his old boss and quips, “I know there wasn’t some palm trees and 401(k) planned for me, but tell me you guys had some exit strategy.” Lloyd Hansen is his exit strategy, and this nutter will stop at nothing to snuff Six and steal the drive. Unlike the latest Bond installment (which subverted the stakes on an essentially invincible hero, proving him to be mortal after all), audiences are not seriously concerned for Six’s life. ![]() And so the game of high-stakes hot potato begins. Before Six completes his assignment, Four passes him a USB drive with incriminating evidence - the movie’s MacGuffin. It seems there’s been a regime change at the agency: Fitzroy and bureau chief Margaret Cahill (Alfre Woodard) are out, and Carmichael is dismantling the Sierra program one assassin at a time. So much of “The Gray Man” depends on the its-in-our-DNA familiarity with action films and conspiracy thrillers, allowing the screenplay (credited to Joe Russo, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) to take short cuts and logic leaps over far-fetched twists, like Six’s discovery that he’d been ordered to take out Sierra Four. Windon shoots the action from a distance, emphasizing the choreography and staging over the immersive, rough-and-tumble logistics of a fist fight. The Russos trust that their audience has seen a million films like this (the operation recalls the opening of James Cameron’s “True Lies” and even Netflix’s recent “Red Notice”). In the film’s first hit, set in fluorescent-lit Bangkok, Six and fellow agent Dani Miranda ( Ana de Armas) have been ordered to take out a mark at a flashy New Year’s Eve party. On the other hand, Evans’ Lloyd Hansen is a contract killer with an appetite for torture who relishes any opportunity to flout the rules. Six (not to be confused with 007) is a killer with a conscience, even if most of his hits are ordered from above, requiring no real judgment on his part. It sounds like a reckless, doomed-to-fail idea, though subtle clues - and later, more overt flashbacks - reveal that the crime that landed Gosling’s Sierra Six behind bars was a relatively moral one. The idea: Take convicted killers and turn them into strategic assassins, offering them “freedom” in exchange for a kind of obligatory service to the agency. Gosling’s nameless character was recruited straight out of prison by old-timer Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) as part of the experimental Sierra program. Neither has a license to kill, exactly, though both do so at the behest of the same boss: newly appointed CIA group chief Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page). Most important, in co-star (and ex-Captain America) Chris Evans, it has a villain who’s as flamboyantly over-the-top as Gosling is understated.īoth play professional killers who operate outside the limits of what is legally acceptable - lurking off the grid, in the shadowy “gray zone” that offers the CIA plausible deniability for any murders they commit. “The Gray Man” has the huge, globe-trotting heft of that franchise and a few can’t-be-accidental overlaps - but more on that in a moment. A reportedly $200 million whopper that Netflix will release first in theaters (on July 15) and then a week later on its streaming service, this is “Avengers: Endgame” directors Anthony and Joe Russo’s answer to the James Bond franchise (which reached its end game, with Daniel Craig at least, in last year’s “No Time to Die”).
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