‘The Gray Man’ Review: Familiar Shade of Gray
metroweekly.comSomewhere during the tediously long shootout that more or less climaxes Joe and Anthony Russo’s uneven espionage actioner The Gray Man (★★☆☆☆), it hit me that I couldn’t exactly recall the name of the movie’s hero, played by Ryan Gosling.
Was it Cord, or Cole? It’s not that it never came up, but somehow, his name — Court Gentry, as it turns out — simply didn’t register.It also didn’t seem to matter, both because Court had intentionally become a ghost, a CIA operative known only as Sierra Six, and because Gosling’s bland take on the trained assassin with “a very particular set of skills” à la Taken feels like it could have been played by any number of A-list actors.That’s so not the case with Six’s ruthless nemesis Lloyd Hansen, a name repeated often, with fear or infuriation, and a villain personified with an oddball mix of glee and cruelty by erstwhile Captain America, Chris Evans.Between two Avengers films and two Captain America sequels, the Russo’s have banked billions at the box office on the back of Evans’ preternaturally upstanding Marvel hero.
Here, they clearly delight in pushing their all-American boy scout to the dark side as craven mercenary Hansen, tasked with recovering the movie’s mid-stakes MacGuffin, a micro memory card, by any means necessary.Evans also clearly delights in twisting his smirking bonhomie into Lloyd’s chuckle-faced nastiness.
Read more on metroweekly.com