Even with the big budgets and big stars, Netflix movies have still seemed a bit mediocre to me. Nevertheless, The Gray Man looked like a fun action, spy-fi film that I would enjoy. Though the tale of an assassin going rogue and being chased by his own agency has strong Bourne echoes, the idea of Ryan Gosling going against Chris Evans seems exciting enough. This movie doesn’t get high marks for originality, but there are some fresh action sequences (I enjoyed one of the early ones involving fireworks cannons), and others that have been done before but are perhaps done better here (I’m thinking of a streetcar fight that is carried off very well in this movie, even though it lacks some of the martial arts flair of the bus fight from Marvel’s Shang-Chi).

In lieu of an amnesiac Jason Bourne, Ryan Gosling plays Sierra Six, an ex-con with a traumatic past, recruited by Billy Bob Thornton to trade his jail term for indentured servitude as one of the CIA’s off-the-books assassins. When his “bad guy” target is not exactly who he’s told he was (something that was not really much of a surprise given how his handler/boss just kept deflecting questions about the target’s identity and referring to him as a “bad” person) Sierra Six (aka “Six”) breaks away on his own to find out the truth. Rising-star actor Regé-Jean Page (of Bridgerton fame) plays Carmichael, the aforementioned sketchy CIA boss, who needs to get Six under control (not to mention getting Six to turn over something that this target may have given to him — suspicious yet?) and sends all kinds of agents after him. This includes eventually turning to Lloyd Hansen (played with unhinged charm by Chris Evans) — a former agent turned ruthless mercenary — to finish the job. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the somewhat extraneous Ana de Armas (previously seen playing a much better spy in No Time To Die), as Six’s de facto partner and fellow agent Dani Miranda.

Being subordinated so much to the action and spectacle, the plot is relatively unimportant in this movie. Even many of the potentially cool spy-fi elements and details are not really explored. Six is a “gray man”, with absolutely no dossier or known info about him — he’s supposed to be a complete cypher. However, that doesn’t seem to matter, and it definitely doesn’t make it any more difficult for Lloyd Hansen and the other agents to find him or find people he cares about who can be kidnapped and leveraged against him. Nor does his unknowability mean that his enemies are in any way surprised by his skill or lethalness. Gosling plays Six just as you might expect from his other action roles (strong, silent, and stolid), which is meant to be a foil for Evans’s Lloyd Hansen. Quite opposite to his most famous role as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Captain America, Evans gets to cut loose a bit and play up his smug, charming side. Hansen is the kind of mercenary who considers himself more clever than the people who hire him, and likes to have fun with his targets like a cat playing with a mouse. He’s also the type of character whose confidence barely hides a volatile insecurity that is easily goaded when his pride is tested. Though it seems like Hansen and Six are meant to be hunter and hunted, I don’t think that was pulled off well. It wasn’t because of the actors themselves (though that’s obviously why you hire A-list leads for this movie), but the script just wasn’t quite successful at establishing that kind of relationship. Neither got into the mind of the other, neither seemed to think of the other as a challenger, and they didn’t really have much interaction or actually know each other. There is a big fight scene at the climax of the movie, but there isn’t much banter involved. If the two have any onscreen chemistry, Evans is supplying most of that on his own.

Similarly, the plot held very few twists or surprises. At first it’s a chase after Six, and then when certain characters are kidnapped to bait Six, it becomes a rescue story. All of it is pretty thin justification for some faux globe hopping, tons of action sequences, car chases, and other spy-fi standards, all executed with big-budget gloss and shine. This movie has a bit more swagger than the Bourne films (and the characters here seem more suave and better-dressed), but sadly, I expect that I will forget this movie a lot easier. The ending too was disappointingly unsatisfying despite a tiny bit of a twist (let’s call it a “turn”). Hard to believe it was delivered by the same directors who brought us Avengers: Endgame and several of the MCU’s biggest blockbusters. (3.5 out of 5)