"In The Grey" is Obsessed With its Own Manafactured Coolness

Rant Inbound...

There was a time when a new Guy Ritchie film felt like a genuine event, a shot of cinematic adrenaline delivered with a cheeky wink and a perfectly tailored suit. But as his filmography expands at an almost industrial rate, that cheeky wink has hardened into a vacant stare. Ritchie has essentially become a man running an assembly line, churning out projects with such staggering frequency that one must ask whether the goal is artistic expression or simply generating overhead for his next venture. "In the Grey" arrives as the latest casualty of this overbooked schedule. It is a film that practically radiates the energy of an $80 million backyard vacation project, an excuse for the director to hang out with his exceptionally good-looking friends while entirely phoning in the actual mechanics of filmmaking.

The premise at least offers the raw materials for a sturdy, sophisticated thriller. Eiza González plays Rachel Wild, a fiercely guarded lawyer specializing in the recovery of massive debts for corporate sharks like Rosamund Pike’s Bobby Sheen. When a billion dollars is swallowed up by Manny Salazar, a dictator comfortably fortified on his own private island, Rachel calls in her two bespoke battering rams: Sid and Bronco, played by Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal. Visually, the film is slathered in Ritchie’s unmistakable trademarks. The snappy editing is intact, the international locations are lavish enough to induce motion sickness, and the cast is draped in gentleman-esque finery that makes every firefight look like a high-stakes fashion shoot—only missing designer guns. The mandate on set seems to have been to look incredibly cool at all costs. The problem is that looking cool is the only thing the movie actually knows how to do.

In his prime, Ritchie’s dialogue was the rhythmic, bruising engine of his movies—a barrage of working-class poetry and razor-sharp insults. Here, the dialogue is disastrously empty, bogged down by suffocating reams of exposition masquerading as wit. It feels profoundly pretentious and, in its weakest moments, aggressively stupid. The actors are stranded in a script devoid of genuine character depth or organic humor, forced to rattle off rapid-fire lines that ultimately signify nothing. One gets the distinct, cynical impression that Ritchie simply strolled onto the set, hastily instructed Cavill and Gyllenhaal to ensure their jawlines were catching the light, and then immediately absconded on his private jet to prep his next distraction.

To its minor credit, "In the Grey" does attempt to subvert a couple of worn-out action tropes. By focusing heavily on the meticulous logistical and legal legwork required to execute a siege—rather than just blindly dropping its heroes into a jungle with machine guns—it briefly flirts with an interesting procedural angle. But this structural deviation comes at the grave expense of momentum and originality. Stripped of the scrappy, kinetic hunger of his earlier work, the whole affair takes on the unmistakable, hollow qualities of a straight-to-streaming programmer. What should be thrilling feels utterly weightless. The violence is slick but entirely devoid of stakes, and his once-trademark formula now feels remarkably well-worn and stale.

This picture forces a reckoning with Ritchie’s recent output, which has become an erratic flip of the coin. The man is juggling far too many plates, and the collateral damage is evident on screen. When he slows down and cares, we get perfectly decent, muscular entertainment like The Covenant, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, or the surprisingly sharp television adaptation of The Gentlemen. But far too often, we are subjected to the dreary, lowest-common-denominator slop of Operation Fortune or Fountain of Youth. In the Grey belongs firmly in the latter camp. It's a film so violently obsessed with its own manufactured coolness that it crosses the line into pomposity, leaving an audience with absolutely nothing to hold onto. One has to wonder if the lavish, billionaire lifestyle Ritchie so frequently depicts on screen has finally started to get to him, replacing the gritty auteur with a detached aristocrat. But who am I to say? All I know is that when an action picture spends this much money and leaves you feeling this completely numb, the rot has to start at the top.

4/10