The Gray Man, starring Ryan Gosling.
Were not some of you talking about this movie? I’m a big Gosling fan and gave it a whirl tonight. I made it to 1hr 17min, and I think I had about 51 minutes left. Little things started annoying me, like the sheer amount of physical exertion Six can do without breaking a sweat, every scene having sped up drone shots, then everything being cut like a Fast N Furious movie. I hung in there for awhile longer, then realized I had no idea why they were in Croatia , then Prague, Khazakhstan, Singapore (?), or anywhere else. It was like a Bourne movie where they took out all subtlety. And Czechs don’t speak English with German accents, you cnuts!
Not that this movie was trafficking in subtlety or originality, at any point. If you asked an A.I. to write you a generic Europe-trotting action movie about a secret agent/hitman who gets double crossed, you get this. Except actual humans who have lived actual human experiences and emotions wrote this. Not a good look for humans.
It also was slavishly devoted to Tarantino’s aesthetic (e.g., old mellow tunes during violence, stylized violence played for laughs, actors who have watched Pulp Fiction too often) but was unable to pull it off. The kid/teenagers girl in the movie is really getting on my nerves cuz every film they feel compelled to write an extended snappy dialogue scene for her (cf: Once Upn A Time In Hollywood). fecking let the kid grow up and become a star or not. But these hey-look-this-kid-is-acting!!! scenes are getting on my tits. Chris Evans was hammy, Billy Bob was hammy, and Gosling had no personality. The guy who played the CIA was fecking dire too. I wondered why I was still watching.
Gratuitous torture, physics-defying fights and explosions, craaaaaaaazy villains. La Femme Nikita, 100 years ago was interesting because they trained a woman to be a killer, against genre stereotypes. Now they switched it back to dudes. Boring. Maybe the ending is so shocking, unpredictable, and insane it redeems the whole thing - but I doubt it.
3/10