‘In the Grey’ Review

For the bulk of its runtime, Guy Ritchie’s ‘In the Grey’ feels less like a movie than a coke-fueled game of “and then” recited into a dictaphone and never polished into a coherent narrative. It is an action movie largely devoid of action, a buddy comedy with nary a joke, and a thriller without any stakes or drama.

Rosamund Pike plays Bobby Sheen, a shady asset manager whose company loans out money to criminal enterprises with no moral qualms. When one of these criminals, Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem), refuses to pay off a billion dollar debt, Bobby hires the contractor Rachel Wild (Eiza González) with her mercenary henchmen Sid and Bronco (Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal) to extort payment from Salazar through physical and financial coercion.

The first half of ‘In the Grey’ is essentially one long exposition dump, sometimes delivered through Eiza González’s grating voiceover narration, sometimes through the characters themselves talking each other through every little thing they are doing or planning to do and why. The action, when it finally kicks in, is condensed into the final twenty minutes and plays out predictably, with little creativity or energy.

As has been the case with many of these late-stage Guy Ritchie films, the script feels like a first draft that was never fleshed out into something more satisfying. Character motivations are treated like an afterthought, which can be excused in a trashy action movie if the creativity was instead poured into the fight scenes. But unfortunately, there’s no cleverness to be found there either, so I’m left wondering what exactly the filmmakers cared about. When characters betray each other, it is nonsensical as if Guy Ritchie couldn’t be arsed to figure out the why and instead hand-waves any complications aside, assuming his audience is too stupid or too disinterested to care about the story actually making sense. One befuddling example of the film’s peculiarity is a scene in which Cavill and Gyllenhaal walk in on Rosamund Pike working out on a treadmill in her office, in full business attire. Nobody acts like this is strange behavior, and it is never addressed again.

Eiza González is miscast as the leader of this mercenary unit, lacking the gravitas to believably command a cut-throat operation filled with violence, coercion and high stakes negotiating. She is further underserved by her character’s writing, which seems unable to decide whether she’s a calculating, intimidating professional or a cowering damsel, so the film uses her as both depending on what the story demands in any given scene.

Henry Cavill is a stable presence, but Jake Gyllenhaal takes bigger swings in his role as more of the wildcard to Cavill’s Mr. Sensible, including some in-and-out accent work that I could never quite figure out. Their banter, though intermittent, attempts humor, but none of it lands as funny and I’m left unsure as to what their relationship with one another truly is. When there’s no backstory, only strangely ineffective zingers, there is no emotional stake.

Given Ritchie’s unwillingness to develop the plot or the characters, the story ends with a surprise, not because of some clever twist, but because of the confusion left with the audience inevitably wondering “huh, that was it?” Sadly, ‘In the Grey’ is proof positive that writing a clever crime caper takes effort and when the story is treated like a boring distraction, the result is a yawning frustration that will be forgotten soon after the credits roll.

In the Grey
Rated R for violence, language and a sexual reference.
Running Time: 1 hour and 38 minutes

Director Guy Ritchie
Writers Guy Ritchie
Stars Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal, Eiza González, Kristofer Hivju, Fisher Stevens, Rosamund Pike
Rating R
Running Time 98 Minutes
Genres Action, Drama, Thriller