In The Grey Review
An efficient semi-heist actioner, but Ritchie feels a little formulaic and charmless with this one.
Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem) is a ruthless despot who hasn’t paid back a $1 billion loan to asset manager Bobby Sheen (Rosamund Pike). Sheen enlists the help of Rachel (Eiza Gonzalez) and her crack team led by Sid (Henry Cavill) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) to take down the billionaire and get the money back.
In The Grey has many of the same ingredients as Ritchie’s Man from U.N.C.L.E., but lacks one crucial one; charm.
The film is a serviceable heisty actioner, with an intriguing premise built around the levers this team has to use to hurt the big bad Salazar. The action, when it happens, can be fun and inventive - with effective sequences in bars, on gyrocopters, in ATVs and many more. But like any Guy Ritchie joint, it’s interspersed with the zippy over the top dialogue planning the sequence or the heist, or the chase. The plan is more entertaining, often, than the result.
But that’s where In The Grey falls flat a little bit, because the zippy dialogue just doesn’t hit. Maybe it’s a script thing, or maybe it’s because Eiza Gonzalez feels pretty miscast in this role. Maybe it’s just an accent thing - does this work better in a British brogue? Whatever it is, the chemistry across the board is pretty absent, and it lends this movie a real sense that it is a Guy Ritchie rip off rather than the real thing; pretty odd, considering who directed it.
There are brief flashes of chemistry and levity. Gyllenhaal and Cavill often have quite leaden interactions, both playing tremendously straight and uninteresting, but when they lighten up a little and have some fun banter between them, the movie soars. And the actual ways in which this team takes down the bad guy is genuinely quite interesting, in a way much more so than the big shoot em up sequences that you might expect to see.
Ultimately, this has all the hallmarks of a Ritchie film, and if you’re a fan you’ll probably have a perfectly fine time in the theatre. But In The Grey will likely be just that for you - something grey, and forgettable.
