Joel on Film

In the Grey is all about its action, its espionage and the various genre stylings and mainstays that come with both of those things, and importantly, it’s about all of those things with a lot of style and attitude. It shouldn’t be too surprising to learn, then, that the movie was written and directed by Guy Ritchie, who established his entire career upon his ability to craft such movies. Even so, this is a particularly satisfying one from the filmmaker, though it would be foolish in the extreme to expect anything like depth from the proceedings.

Its two protagonists, for instance, are the hired muscle for the businesswoman who narrates the picture, played with cool acumen by Eiza González. She’s Rachel Wild, an agent with an asset management firm whose job it is to provide loans for questionable clientele—for instance, billionaire Manny Salazar, played by Carlos Bardem, who owns an entire island in addition to the local government and the police enforcing the laws on it. Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill are, respectively, Bronco and Sid, who are independent contractors on loan to Rachel’s company for the purpose of taking back the billions of dollars in loans Salazar has not paid back yet.

With that paragraph, this review has explained all that is actually relevant about the broad strokes of the plot, as well as any thematic or subjective concerns in Ritchie’s screenplay. In case the sly joke there passed you by, indeed, there are no deeper levels, but such a concept is not in Ritchie’s interests. Considering how breezily entertaining all this is, executed with a fine sense of the style and attitude for which he is known, the movie never makes the case that it necessarily needs any deeper levels.

Here, the story of the movie is all in the archetypes, as well as in Ritchie’s willingness to color inside the lines of a constantly evolving plot, with all its cogs whirring, as well-oiled machines are known to do. Bronco and Sid have slightly different personalities, although it would be wrong to suggest either of them necessarily playing the straight man to the other’s wild card. The former is, perhaps, a little more of a brute than the latter, who enjoys putting on a debonair act: Then again, we get to see Cavill in a sombrero at some point during all this, so the actors are definitely having a little fun with their own established personalities, too.

González slips snugly into this material, too, in which the always-cool Rachel juggles the constant complications of her job with the increasing number of henchmen (Kristofer Hivju plays the main one, who always seems to teleport wherever he’s needed) sent her way by Salazar. For his part, Bardem is a lot of slimy fun as the villain, and it’s quite amusing to see how Ritchie makes it a point of pointing out how Salazar becomes increasingly irritated at how incompetent his own men are. Bronco and Sid, that muscular pair, keep proving themselves more capable and better trained in the movie’s many, many action set pieces.

Those sequences are always enjoyable, by the way, because Ritchie attacks them with a real flair for comic timing and punchy—but never mean—violence. True, danger is in short supply here, if only because the filmmaker is working with fundamentally predictable material (part of the climax involves an ambush that comes close to having actual stakes, although we sort of know the villain can’t win in a movie like this). There’s even the extended team of weapons and technology experts, a mainstay in a movie from this director, who knows instinctively how and when to plug such characters into the puzzle.

In the Grey needs neither the complexity that would overcomplicate an already-busy plot, with all its moving pieces, nor the so-called depth, because its characters are here to serve the plot as only they can, that would make it theoretically “better.” It’s already a pretty good, efficiently devised action movie that provides just enough entertainment to satisfy.

Rating: *** (out of ****)