‘I’ ON CULTURE
I generally like Guy Ritchie movies because they tend to be stylish, gangster-style, bits of fun. But In the Grey was a great disappointment. It has stars, great scenery, dead bodies and all the rest. But it has the excitement of a delivery from Domino’s Pizza. You would expect a film about the corrupt ultra rich getting zapped to be fun, especially when the lead villain Salazar (Carlos Bardem) is a major industrialist. But he winds up seeming more fun and interesting than the person who is responsible (Rosamund Pike) for allowing a billion-dollar debt that he reneged on and pays to retrieve the money.
Lawyer Rachel Wild (Eiza González) works “in the grey,” meaning the world outside the black-and-white world of contracts. The problem is that Salazar lives on what is essentially a private island where he has a couple of spectacular homes (and stunning women who seem to never speak) and also a private army, as well as essentially owning the police. And he owes a billion dollars, has a sleazy attorney (Fisher Stevens) for legal protection and a lot of hidden assets.
That, of course, sounds like great fun, in terms of a setup. So Wild hires some top mercenaries, Sid (Henry Cavill) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal), and a team of tough guys (just about all of whom are good-looking and experts with weapons) to retrieve the money.
It sounds like this could be real fun. The problem is that the plot is so convoluted that about two-thirds of the film is the setup. Wild is a top, even if shady, lawyer, but even when she gets court victories, she can’t get to the money. Thus the mercenaries. And they work with her to mess up Salazar’s businesses. Yes, it is amusing to watch the big shot screaming on the phone about getting work stoppages through assorted bits of sabotage. But it just is not all that exciting.
Finally, the mercenaries get to the bad guy’s island which, for cinematic purposes, is gorgeous. The movie was made on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. But for a place that is supposedly run with an iron fist, there seems to be a lot of police but just about no surveillance. Which, of course, would have quickly found out that there were people out to get the ruler.
So we get to see some loving looks at fancy weapons plus a wide assortment of fun-looking vehicles and some great driving and motorcycle tricks. For much of the movie, they are essentially tricks with no direct action taken against the bad guy. They are essentially a long-winded setup with lots of explanation that makes certain we can fully appreciate what will come later. Finally, we see a quick victory and then betrayal — and finally a set action sequence that has loads of explosions, dead bodies, heroism and crazy stunts. But all of that comes near the end of the movie.
The problem is that there is almost no sense of fun. The lines are often delivered in monotones. There seems almost no real passion in the mercenaries who, after all, are supposed to be the real heroes. It’s more a matter of deciding who goes where, so they can be efficient. The bad guys are the ones who have the emotions. Bardem and Stevens show far more emotion than anyone else. Bardem seems to just seethe and demand action. There is no evidence that he has the brains it might have taken to become an industrial powerhouse. And Stevens just gets nervous because despite supposedly being a powerhouse attorney, he always loses.
Cavill and Gyllenhaal essentially disappear. They are totally vanilla good guys. Loyal beyond belief. And they and their people are seemingly able to kill dozens of the bad guy’s soldiers almost at will. Gonzalez, in the flashiest part, is shown winning legal battles, but later becomes simply the “damsel in distress” when the action comes. Yes, she is very pretty, but that seems to be irrelevant in this film, where there is no hint of any emotion outside of greed.
And that hurts. The good guys do lots of killing, presumably for money, and are essentially boring. Everyone is boring. But the scenery is nice, and the movie is a reasonably pleasing distraction. Wait until it comes to the small screen. It is, frankly, not worth the price of a ticket, not to mention the snacks that might go with it.
