Saturday 7 October 2023

The Gray Man (2022 Anthony & Joe Russo)

Anonymous title - film could have been called No. 6 - is like having several shots of adrenaline, James Bond / Bourne pumped up 1000%, as Ryan Gosling chops, shoots, stabs, punches, flies and runs (and is attacked, beaten, stabbed, shot at, shot, blown up, ejected from a plane) through an exhausting two hours (two hours nine minutes, thank you) trying to save mentor Tommy Lee Jones and his daughter Julia Butters from rogue CIA agent Chris Evans.

Very much influenced by Killing Eve with its globe-trotting and big titles.

Lots and lots of CGI, but we often laughed at the audaciousness of the action. The film moves so fast it's impossible to take a screen shot.


With Ana de Armas, Jessica Henwick, Dhanush (you know*, Why This Kolaveri Di, composed for the Tamil film 3), Alfre Woodard, Regé-Jen Page.

Written by Joe Russo and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely, from  a novel by Mark Greaney. DP Stephen Windon, millions of edits by Jeff Groth and Pietro Scalia.

* Talk about major rabbit holes. Dhanush is a major actor-singer from the Tamil state of India, in the south, where Tamil is widely spoken. He's known for films like Vada Chennai and Asuran.

1 comment:

  1. Mark Greaney's writing is first class and pacy. You may also like the reasonably fast/furious pace of the spy novel Beyond Enkription in #TheBurlingtonFiles series but do note that Beyond Enkription is a fact based novel full of real characters written by a spy not an author!

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