‘In the Grey’ Review: Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill Can’t Save Guy Ritchie’s Generic Actioner

The complicated plot of In the Grey suggests that the movie it ultimately became is not the one that was originally planned. There are so many details that need to be explained just to understand what is going on that the first half-hour of Guy Ritchie’s film is spent trying to make sure the audience has some idea of what’s happening. And then, not much is done with that information. There are a couple of intense action sequences, an unexpected twist or two, and not much else. Its running time, a mere 97 minutes (90 without the credits), leaves the impression that something, possibly quite a lot, was left behind, perhaps on the editing-room floor. Most notably, something resembling a personality or a conflict for its two protagonists.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill don’t have much to do beyond looking muscular and stylish in clothes that many viewers will probably rush to find the price of. For the film’s two leads, they seem to have little more personality than their biceps. Nor is there any real conflict between them, beyond a few exchanges that range from mildly biting to mildly amusing and are ultimately irrelevant. They play Special Ops operatives who take on the jobs assigned to them by lawyer Rachel Wild (Eiza González, who is the film’s true protagonist and its best asset), a woman who represents investment banks. Or something like that. There’s not much point in explaining exactly what happens: it goes from incomprehensible to ultimately irrelevant.

Sid (Cavill) and Bronco (Gyllenhaal) are her muscle, the men who run a team of specialists handling the dirty work that comes out of the lawyer’s schemes. Rachel sends them after a mobster named Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem, speaking an incomprehensible version of English), who refuses to pay back the millions he took from an investment bank. Or something like that. Rosamund Pike — who surely had a more substantial role in whatever version of the film existed before this one — plays Bobby Sheen, the executive at the firm negotiating with Rachel to recover the money. She will do so in exchange for ten percent of the total. If I understood correctly, that amounts to no less than $100 million.

Ritchie uses González’s voice-over to explain the plot and then has “Sid and Bronco” — the film could easily have been called that — explain to their half-dozen interchangeable team members the various operations they will carry out to stealthily strip Salazar of his money and companies. They also have every possible move the mobster might make carefully calculated. That is, sending people to kill Rachel and put an end to the problem once and for all. So, once the information dump and the step-by-step calculations are out of the way, the action begins. The second half of the film is somewhat more entertaining thanks to two lengthy chase-and-combat sequences, which the protagonists dispatch without breaking much of a sweat or even messing up their hair.

In the Grey is as routine as they come and, beyond its respectable cast, could easily have been one of those B-movies destined to go straight to streaming (this one was released theatrically). British filmmaker Ritchie may be a competent director of action sequences in the Michael Bay school of frenetic editing, but his films rarely go much beyond what’s on the surface. With a few notable exceptions, such as Wrath of Man or, to a lesser extent, The Covenant, the director of Snatch has long since become a professional purveyor of action-adventure movies that are increasingly inconsequential and impersonal. Here, beyond an expensive cast and a budget that allowed the production to travel around the world, what we get is a mediocre example of contemporary action cinema. Or, perhaps, what’s left of one.