The Gray Man is mindless fun, worth your monthly Netflix subscription, notes Aseem Chhabra.
We all know Netflix is in trouble having lost nearly a million subscribers in the last quarter.
But the streaming service has a few surprises in store for all of us, starting with the $200 million production of The Gray Man, directed by Anthony and Joe Russo.
Borrowing heavily from every successful action franchise, including the James Bond and Bourne films (and even a nod to Stanley Kubrick's The Shinning), The Gray Man is not the smartest new product introduced in the market.
But it is pretty clear that this heavy action-based, explosion-laden film will bring in the audience that Netflix desperately needs.
Perhaps it seems the global premium streaming service is done with prestige pictures like The Irishman and Roma.
Instead, Netflix executives are following the tried and trusted path of dropping an über mainstream film to save their souls.
And given that The Gray Man will be watched by millions of viewers, there is a strong chance that Netflix may have a big franchise in their hand. They just need to get catchy theme music to get the future The Gray Man films going.
Ryan Gosling plays a convicted felon in jail for killing his father.
Suddenly, he is recruited by a CIA operative Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) to join a special force called the Sierra with plans to kill a lot of bad people.
Gosling is given the name Six ('Yeah, just, that 007 was taken, so...', Six says explaining to a character). And because the Sierra killers have no shades of morality, they are called gray men.
Gosling, the Canadian star, started his career as Disney's Mouseketeer and much later charmed our hearts in The Notebook, Lars and the Real Girl and La La Land.
But he has also played the smooth killer in Drive and Only God Forgives.
So he is perfectly suited to lead the potential franchise, where he does not have to talk much, give an occasional smirk or a wink, but mostly rest his character on the fight sequences and his natural good looks.
Years later, something has gone wrong with the Sierra project.
A senior CIA officer Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page) sends Six to kill Four (another Sierra member).
You see, Four has a locket with an encrypted drive that has the history of all the dirty unauthorised deeds that Carmichael has done. And now Carmichael wants the drive back.
So he sends another lunatic killer Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans who was Captain America in the Russo brothers' Avengers films) to get the locket from Six.
Hansen's introduction -- he has a higher killer count than all of Mossad, although he just comes across as a loud, sadistic killer and often quite bad at what he does.
His other credit is that he attended Harvard with Carmichael.
Yes, the film gives strange back stories to its characters.
Much of The Gray Man is packed with action sequences to find the locket and the drive, and desperate attempts to rescue a sweet young girl with a pacemaker (Julie Butters playing Claire), with many crazy killers, including a brief appearance by Dhanush in the role of Lone Wolf aka Avik San (Hansen keeps referring to him as my Ta-meel friend).
Dhanush is a terrific in the fight sequences, knifing Six in his leg and the stomach.
At some points, he exits the plot, but fans of the Tamil star will be glad to know the Russo brothers have hinted that Lone Wolf will reappear in the future The Gray Man films.
The globe-trotting film takes its characters on a wild ride around the world, although some of the scenes are obviously shot inside studios.
We are taken on a journey through Europe (London, Berlin, Vienna, Croatia and Prague, where the centre of the city is virtually blown up) and Asia (Bangkok, Hong Kong, Chiang Mai, Baku and Turkey).
Of course, there are mandatory scenes in Langley and Washington, DC.
But other than the sequences in Bangkok and later Prague, The Gray Man does not do much justice to the foreign locations in a way that one sees in the Bond films.
Joe Russo wrote the script of The Gray Man along with Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.
The plot is thin.
All we get for $200 million is a lot of loud sound, shootings, grenades exploding and cars blowing up.
But The Gray Man is mindless fun, worth your monthly Netflix subscription.
The Gray Man streams on Netflix.
