Netflix’s The Gray Man shows the Avengers directors can’t think small enough
What kind of filmmakers are Anthony and Joe Russo when they aren’t making Marvel movies? As the directing duo behind the biggest and most profitable Avengers films (and most profitable blockbusters ever) the pair seem to have carte blanche to pursue their interests, and they’ve partnered with streamers who are happy to get out of their way and let them follow whatever muse they like. Their first post-Marvel film, Cherry, released on Apple TV Plus, applied their blockbuster sensibilities to a story that didn’t really need it: the opioid crisis. In that film, spectacle consumed its characters, weaving an empty story about a potent tragedy. Perhaps that wasn’t a fluke.
Now working with Netflix, the Russos have followed up with The Gray Man, an airport-thriller adaptation that also seems like a weird fit for them. It’s adapted from the first novel in Mark Greaney’s long-running series about Court Gentry, aka Sierra Six, the eponymous Gray Man. Ryan Gosling plays Gentry, a man the audience first meets in prison. In a prologue set years before the main plot, top CIA spook Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) recruits Gentry to kill whoever the CIA tells him to, no questions asked. In exchange, he gets out of prison. Flash forward to the present, and Gentry faces a delicious question that drives the plot into motion: How does a man with his job retire?
It’s baffling that two of the most commercially successful directors in Hollywood apparently cannot make a film as compelling as that question. This is not a critique of The Gray Man’s plot. While it’s rote, it mostly exists to support an efficient action movie. Action fans can probably call just about every major plot beat past the starting line, where Sierra Six refuses to
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