movie review - The Gray Man
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
This is a spy thriller in which the government aims one of its off-the-books killers at another of their killers. We see the way that our hero was recruited from prison, and we get a glimpse into what the intervening years of assassinations has been like. But without knowing he's targeting one of his own, our man is unprepared for the degree of skill in his quarry and the man initially eludes him. Our guy catches up with him and the target dies, but in doing so he hands something off to his killer. It's from this point that our man finds himself under suspicion from his own organization and seemingly surrounded by enemies.
The movie is a bit of a rush from this point, and that's good and bad. It certainly has a plot that would fall apart if everything hadn't happened just the way it was described, but that is not unusual in the drama and is something most people ignore. We're also subjected to trope-level cliches in the addition of a blank sociopath as our man's chief hunter and a female lead who is .. also there. Neither of these two are what you'd call characters, they're more like stand-ins for actual characters. Having just seen this, I couldn't describe exactly what everyone's motivation is, here. All that said, it's also hard to make out a lot of the detail and even some of the action because everyone's wearing black under the cover of night (except when it's fireballs in broad daylight). Before you know it, the hunt for our hero has basically fallen apart out of sheer incompetence, and everyone's fetched up in a .. I want to say 'villa' but 'palace' might be better. There's a confused finale and that's it.
Not recommended. I'm not really sure why this was made. It was better than Red Notice, also from Netflix, but that one made me mad - this, this I'll just forget.
