It has not been a smooth road for Guy Ritchie’s In the Grey. Shot way back in 2023, the starry action flick led by Jake Gyllenhaal, Henry Cavill, and Eiza Gonzalez was in release date limbo due to post-production and distribution issues. More on that later. Now it’s finally being dumped into theaters so unceremoniously it’s as if someone forgot they still had responsibility for it. Ritchie is a filmmaker with a roller coaster track record; snappy British crime flicks (his wheelhouse), blockbuster actioners, the occasional war movie (The Covenant is maybe his best film ever?), and then shockingly derivative stuff like this. Don’t worry, you’ll forget about In the Grey before long, too.
While Gyllenhaal and Cavill are the two top names, it’s Gonzalez who is at the center of everything. She plays Rachel, a fierce, confident, and brilliant attorney who works in asset management, or better, she makes sure rich people pay their debts in full no matter how hare they try to hide their money. That’s what Rachel is good at, sifting through all of the various money laundering schemes to get at the loot so it can be taken back for her client, pompous banking official Bobby, played by Rosamund Pike. Cavill and Gyllenhaal are the heads of Rachel’s security team, Sid and Bronco. In true Ritchie fashion, they squabble like fratboys sharing a dorm, but they will do anything Rachel says and will do everything to keep her safe. Because when your job is taking money away from shady billionaires trying to hide it, shit can get deadly real quick.
And that’s the case for Rachel here, because the target is Manny, played by Carlos Bardem, an elitist billionaire scumbag who owes Bobby’s company one billion dollars that he has no intention of paying. The last guy who came to collect, Rachel’s friend and mentor, met a bloody fate at the hands of Manny’s enforcer, played by fan favorite Game of Thrones actor Kristofer Hivju. It’s up to Sid and Bronco to make sure that doesn’t happen to Rachel.
Clocking in at just over 90 minutes, fully one hour of In the Grey is about explaining this complicated world of debt retrieval. Seriously, an action flick driven by debt collection sounds about as exciting as a Star Wars movie centered around trade routes. So the film slogs along, with Rachel literally having to explain everything to the audience as if they were idiots. It’s so bad that Ritchie’s lone stylistic flourish this time around is explaining, in written words all over the screen, what is already being explained to you. The funny thing is, none of it is as complicated as Ritchie seems to make of it. Simply put, Rachel uses a series of legal manuevers to take away Manny’s expensive toys, frustrate his beleagued lawyer played by Fisher Stevens, and exert her leverage over the billionaire crimelord. Doing so will bring him to the table to negotiate. The only problem is that he will only meet on his Epstein-like island, where he has a personal army waiting.
Sure, Gyllenhaal, Cavill, and Gonzalez are effortlessly cool. That sorta comes with the package. But at the same time, the guys operate on one flat level and seem like they are sleepwalking, probably because their characters are one-dimensional and indistinct. Gonzalez, as always, maximizes her minutes and her funny, scrappy performance the film’s one real highlight. The final act is more what like what we expect from Ritchie. A massive action set piece involving explosions, trap doors, motorcycle chases, ziplines, helicopters, and loads of heavy artillery is exactly the spectacle In the Grey needed to be, rather than a movie that wastes its time drowning the audience in expository dialog. My guess is that the post-production troubles had to do with reshoots intended to simplify things a little, but either that plan failed or it didn’t happen at all. Whatever the case, there’s no grey area with In the Grey, as it’s squarely one of the weakest films of Ritchie’s career. Fortunately, he puts out like two or three of the a year so a better one is likely right around the corner.
In the Grey is in theaters now.
