'The Gray Man' review: Even on-screen assassins need something to believe in
The Gray Man is very well-made, if unnervingly empty.
That's what the growth of stylish, hyper-violent, technically accomplished, skillfully produced, massively budgeted movies has done. It has cemented the primacy of an entire category of film that can do everything that could possibly be expected of it, everything it means to do, and can still feel made out of nothing. Cast with talented, capital-M-capital-S Movie Stars with the charisma to carry it – in this case, Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans – a movie like The Gray Man can have a lot of pleasures. It can have cleverness, inventiveness, a wink to its embrace of extremely silly set pieces. But there's something that's just not there about it, an unnerving sense that if you unwound the whole thing layer after layer, you'd discover it's wrapped around only itself.
The setup, based on Mark Greaney's 2009 novel, is this: Years ago, to get out of a long
