The most expensive Netflix movie of all time just looks cheap

Warning, the following are spoilers for The Gray Man: On paper, The Gray Man has it all one of the most exciting blockbusters of the year to be. It comes from the Russo brothers, who made Avengers 4: Endgame, the second highest-grossing film in history. In addition, Ryan Gosling returns after a four-year break from acting, Captain America star Chris Evans plays a mad sadist and action sets are distributed across the globe.

But precisely the action is the big weak point by The Gray Man, which is advertised as the most expensive Netflix film to date with a budget of around 200 million dollars. Especially compared to other blockbuster heavyweights, the flick looks more like a sloppy quick shot.

The action in The Gray Man is often confusing and feels cheap

The start of the Netflix film, in which Gosling’s protagonist is supposed to eliminate a target person as a contract killer, begins promisingly with stylishly built tension. But as soon as the mission fails and the characters engage in gunfire and hand-to-hand combat, the staging weaknesses visible.

Check out the German trailer for The Gray Man here:

The action of The Gray Man is often very confusing, which is one restless camera work in connection with an extremely large number of cuts lies. In addition, the Netflix film repeatedly uses clearly recognizable CGI, which further downgrades the impression of some sequences.

The most blatant negative example: the plane sequence. Here, Gosling’s Six first fights his way through some adversaries in frantic moments before he falls out of the plane and has to fight for a parachute in the air. Due to the extreme use of CGI, which makes the free fall look completely artificial, similar to Uncharted, and the shaky camera everything blurs into a chaotic mushwhich makes the action exhausting to inedible.

The blockbuster competition in the cinema easily trumps The Gray Man

When I compare The Gray Man’s botched airplane scene to Mission: Impossible 6 – Fallout’s breathtaking HALO jump, it’s worlds apart. Of course, not every blockbuster can flaunt a Tom Cruise jumping out of a plane over 100 times. Or with a Tom Cruise, who in Top Gun: Maverick drives the entire cast and himself to perform at their best for realistic flight manoeuvres.

But other action franchises, such as the Bond series with No Time To Die, also showed how powerful and yet cleanly staged action can look like. I’d rather not start on the difference between the spectacular action in the John Wick films and The Gray Man.

With its record budget, The Gray Man definitely wants to play in a league with the biggest cinema heavyweights as the most expensive Netflix film of all time. In terms of staging and visuals, however, the blockbuster is a certificate of inadequacy.

Aside from the intense melee finale in the hedge maze, The Gray Man looks like typical Netflix merchandise. We get a dreary, too dark look with a smooth soft focus for TV optics instead of cinema bombast. Those responsible obviously don’t care that the film is above all viewed on laptops or smartphones becomes. And you can see that.

The most expensive Netflix film: What good is “The Gray Man”?

In the FILMSTARTS podcast on the screen love, substitute moderator Pascal, FILMSTARTS editor Björn and Moviepilot guest Patrick discuss “The Gray Man”, probably the most expensive Netflix film. Whether the action spectacle of the Russo brothers was really successful and how impressed is the trio of muscled Ryan Gosling, you can find out in the podcast.

The screen love is the weekly cinema and film podcast of our colleagues from FILMSTARTS.

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What did you think of the action in The Gray Man?