If “In the Grey” is anything, it is aptly named.
“In the Grey” is director Guy Ritchie’s latest action-adventure film, following lawyer Rachel Wild (Eiza González) and her team of elite operatives as they attempt to steal back $1 billion from relentless oligarch Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem). After a hit on one of Wild’s clients leaves him dead and his money in the hands of Salazar, the group mounts a mission to get it back.
Wild’s team, led by Sid (Henry Cavill) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal), plan on launching a pincer movement involving an attack on Salazar from both a legal standpoint and a more aggressive approach, warring against his private militia.
It’s here that the film’s fun concept falls apart. Even with all of its star power, “In the Grey” fails to develop nearly anything beyond the bare framework of an action movie, resulting in the heavy use of narration to deliver exposition and characters who are less so fleshed-out human beings and more so caricatures of an oversaturated genre.
Cavill and Gyllenhaal play soulless imitations of the slick-shooting special ops agent seen in so many other films before this one. While there is the occasional attempt at a couple-like banter between the two, the conversations feel as though they are grasping at a nonexistent relationship. No matter how good, or good-looking, these two actors may be, it’s hard to portray characters who are written with style rather than substance.
The same can be said about the rest of the film. Although Ritchie is known for his stylized use of narration to explain key plot elements and backstory, that choice felt excessive here, to the point where it seemed everything shown on the screen had a voiceover explaining what the viewer was seeing. Everything in the film is told, not shown.
There is no trust in the audience to come to conclusions on their own — every plan is spelled out by an overt script with no wiggle room for anything to go wrong. Even more frustrating is the fact that nothing does go wrong; there is a montage in the middle of the movie that quite literally depicts the team rehearsing the plan over and over, and the real extraction, which serves as the film’s climax, matches their preparation to a T.
Ritchie also tries playing around with animated sketches and captions that pop up during stretches of expository dialogue. In one scene, Sid bribes an oil rig worker by tossing envelopes of cash into his car, and with each toss, a comic book-like arrow appears, emphasizing the amount of money with the same comedic essence as a “Looney Tunes” animation. The same cartoonish font appears when Bronco is detailing the amount of weaponry needed for the plan, edited in like a new text box pasted to the left side of the screen. It’s stylistic choices like these that further decrease the already nonexistent stakes, and because Ritchie never commits fully to the concept, it ends up feeling gimmicky.
The two main action set pieces, set on Salazar’s island, are okay, but neither provides anything that hasn’t been done before. Motorcycles. Explosions. Chases. Traps. Novelty is at an all-time low in this one.
But perhaps that’s by design. “In the Grey” is just that. Its characters are husks of archetypes seen in hundreds of films prior, and its plot is run-of-the-mill. “In the Grey” exists in a gray area, a middle ground: It lacks innovation and is bolstered by big names, but is sprinkled with enough entertainment to fill its quick runtime.
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