Once upon a time, action movies had soul. Sure, most of them weren’t good – they were shoestring plots with bad acting covered up with visceral action setpieces created through a blend of special effects and technical prowess. In the last year, we’ve slowly seen the genre emerge at peak form, thanks to things like No Time To Die, Extraction, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Top Gun: Maverick, F9, and so on.

Perhaps this recent plethora of options resulted in The Gray Man, Netflix’s big summer action film directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, the men behind Avengers: Endgame. Perhaps making the highest grossing film of all time off a project even a trained seal couldn’t f*ck up went to their heads, because The Gray Man might be the worst action film of the last ten years.

Sierra Six (Ryan Gosling) is the best assassin in the world. He runs black ops missions for the CIA, and he always gets results. However, when a recent hit goes sideways, Six finds himself in possession of a hard drive full of the CIA’s darkest secrets: a hard drive Director Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page) desperately wants back.

To do so, he allows psychopathic rogue freelancer Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans) to utilize any means necessary – even kidnapping the niece (Julia Butters) of Six’s mentor (Billy Bob Thornton) to get to him. And so, with the help of fellow burn-listed agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), Six must travel around the globe, dodging hitmen, in order to find and rescue the young girl.

A major reason that The Gray Man is rotten to its very core is its screenplay. This is not so much a film as it is an amalgamation of other action cliches and plots jumbled together in a dull blender. The top assassin in the world going on the run and fighting off a series of would-be assassins? Jason Bourne. Big leap off the exploding building? Die Hard. Big city-wide car chases in pristine, bulletproof Audis that have the logo facing out and the windows inexplicably down? Fast and Furious.

Each character bumbles their way from scene to scene, making decisions that not only make little sense for the character, but little sense in any regard. The characters never make the logical – or even self-interested – choice, only the choice that best serves the film. This can be seen in the climax, when their problems could be easily fixed by a sniper bullet but would look so much cooler if the big dudes just had a fist fight.

This so-called plot is furthered with the same smarmy hack jokes that have permeated Marvel movies in recent years. Now, one might be willing to write off bad dialogue as an action movie staple. But there are two key reasons it rings so hollow here. The first is that there is no self-awareness (or at least textual self-awareness) in the average action movie.

When Dalton declares “Pain don’t hurt” in Road House, he means that sh*t, giving it an air of humorous gravitas. Here, every line is meant to undercut the drama – drama that is bone-thin to begin with. And that’s not to mention that every line has this offensive sense of “Well, that just happened!” Every single line. Not a single moment of drama. For God’s sakes, even Marvel takes a breather every few minutes.

These are lines like, “Tell me what I don’t know!” “Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Or, “If you wanna make an omelette, you gotta kill some people.” Or, “He’s a sociopath!” “He has methods.” “Sociopathic methods!” Or my favorite absurd line in the entire film, “Why don’t we just skip these fights, you come find me and turn yourself in over lunch. You like sushi?” “No thanks, I just had Skittles.”

These lines, of course, always end with the name “Six,” because the film makes sure to call the character “Six” every thirty seconds – lest we forget his name. And what’s worse is that each line seems to have been written under the assumption it is the quippiest dialogue ever composed, as opposed to the most cliched, most expository dialogue I’ve ever heard.

It’s a film that’s fundamentally evil, if not morally, then visually and narratively. Actually, it may be evil morally as well – in one scene, the CIA sits back and watches as a team of assassins lays waste to a major Vienna city, and only objects when the assassins start shooting police officers instead of civilians. And lest you think this is some sort of commentary, this ethically negotiated objection comes from a protagonist. Civilians are collateral damage, but I draw the line at shooting police officers in my action movies.

If the lack of a story doesn’t scare you off, and those lines mildly appeal to you, don’t worry! The atrocious filmmaking should do the trick! The Russos have never directed a film of their own – their Marvel movies were storyboarded down to the letter, their TV work just meant coming into an established environment, etc. It’s clear why they’ve never been allowed to put their visual stamp on things: they haven’t got one. The film is devoid of life and color; it consists solely of the ugly, flat grays of digital film.

This flatness is brought to life through unnecessary camera flourishes meant to distract from the bad action, and instead give you motion sickness. These consist of more dramatic zooms than Dana Carvey’s The Master of Disguise, as well as conservatively 10,000 of the laziest, most horrifically-staged drone shots I’ve ever seen, played at what seems like 1.25x speed. These shots are occasionally broken up by a title card to remind us just how big the budget is.

Every time the characters enter a new city, or there’s a flashback, or they walk down the street to get a soda, the Russos provide a massive title card to remind audiences where they are. This happens approximately once every five minutes in the two-hour runtime, so expect a lot of these transitions. One could even play a drinking game with the sheer amount of these transitions.

However, this is nothing compared to the editing by Jeff Groth and Pietro Scalia. Their editing features so little care, so little attention to detail, it’s utterly baffling. Because of their work, Ana de Armas’ character seemingly transports around the world in a matter of minutes. In another, we watch a terrified Julia Butters sobbing uncontrollably before instantly cutting to the happiest score I’ve ever heard – and it’s not meant as a creative choice.

One scene quite literally looks like it was screengrabbed from Grand Theft Auto 5. You want to know the moment I knew this was a disaster? I’m a sucker for a fight set to well-edited music, and the sequence here (set to “Silver Bird” by Mark Lindsay) is so haphazardly constructed, I couldn’t muster an ounce of excitement.

The film’s sole merits come in the performances. Oh, don’t get me wrong, most of them are bad. Gosling, an actor I usually love, is woefully miscast in this role, and shockingly unfunny. This is a character who either requires the angst of The Driver in Drive or the humor of Holland March in The Nice Guys. Gosling plays the role as if the characters were slapped together and had the life sucked out of them. Similarly wasted are the normally-terrific performers Regé-Jean Page and Jessica Henwick, so full of life in Bridgerton and The Matrix Resurrections, here resorted to playing the stuffy suit and a character repeatedly referred to as “the B*tch.”

But there are in fact some redeeming performers. Ana de Armas is giving the worst performance of her career, but at least she fills it with enough heart and life to keep an audience captivated. Meanwhile, Wagner Moura plays a weirdo safe house operator with enough originality that his brief scene stands out as a highlight.

Julia Butters tries her best with a terrible script, and she outshines her peers enough to remain the least scathed of the bunch. And as bad as his character is, Evans is kind of fun – although he tips his hand in the end that he’s just doing an impression of Gary Oldman in The Professional. Oh, and if you’re wondering why there’s a random actor who shows up near the end and delivers a monologue that is so bad at acting it almost feels like a trap, that’s because it’s Joe Russo, playing a pointless cameo.

There were only two moments I enjoyed in the entirety of The Gray Man. The first was when I realized there was an easy-to-play drinking game available for the film, and I cursed the multiplex I was at for not having a bar. The second was when I developed a Charley Horse mid-movie, for even the pain was a more enjoyable emotion than watching this film.

It is a film that consists of bad editing, bad pacing, bad musical cues, bad cinematography, and bad acting, all constructed by two TV directors who now think they’re James Cameron. Perhaps if Netflix is trying to figure out why they’re lost so much money in the last year, they should look less at laying off their animation department and LGBT newsletter writers and more at this $200 million abomination.

D

The Gray Man will debut on Netflix July 22^nd; it is now playing in select theaters. I promise you that even when it’s streaming on Netflix for free, there are better uses of your time