What’s it about?
An elite team of operatives is tasked with recovering a cool billion dollars from a ruthless crime lord.
What’d we think?
The premise of In The Grey isn’t nearly as complicated as the movie would have you believe – the bad guy borrowed a billion from some bankers (very fun to say out loud), and the bankers have hired Cool Lawyer (Not Like Regular Lawyers) Rachel Wild (Eiza González) to retrieve it. She has her two right-hand men, Sid and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill), prepare the terrain for her inevitable face-to-face confrontation with the bad guy on his private island. Not that complicated, but the entire first act of the movie is either expository dialogue or hand-holding narration, really making it feel like the audience can’t be trusted to follow along. This is written and directed by Guy Ritchie, but it’s lacking any of the palpable sizzle of his best work. There’s a good chance this was done for the benefit of streaming audiences that’ll be playing on their phones, but this explanation doesn’t make it any less overbearing.
The movie picks up considerably once we actually get into the swing of things as the movie becomes a fun little exercise in competence porn. The boys and their mildly colourful team of vaguely-qualified operators are proper professionals, and the best part of the movie is seeing the preparation that goes into the set pieces that otherwise just seem to happen spontaneously in action movies. They plan multiple escape routes, prepare booby-traps, and study the enemy, all while interfering with the bad guy’s operations enough that he’ll be forced to meet with Rachel. I love a competent henchman in a movie, and this has it in spades.
What the movie’s lacking is any character development, any stakes we care about, and the slickness that would be necessary to gloss over those flaws. Sid and Bronco are interchangeable; they could pretty much swap roles in any scene as they’re both just dry-humoured professionals. They’ve got decent enough chemistry, but that’s because it’s Jake and Henry not the script. The movie becomes a lot more fun when you watch it with the assumption that they’re a married couple, but any fun that might be squeezed out of their bickering is minimised because they’re both just sensible.
In The Grey is a perfectly serviceable movie to put on the TV when you’ve got ironing to do, but for a Guy Ritchie movie starring two of the industry’s best boys, it’s adequate at best.
