In The Grey Review – ‘Action affair does the job’

Is there any studio director working today as prolific as Guy Ritchie? In the last ten years, the British filmmaker has made an astonishing nine feature films, including two huge war movies, a gangster feature, and a billion-dollar-grossing Disney blockbuster, not to mention shepherding four major television shows to the small screen. His latest film — arriving in the same month as new seasons of MobLand and The Gentlemen, for which he has directed several episodes — is hardly a small back-to-basics indie affair. It’s a grand, globe-trotting, action-heavy adventure with explosions and setpieces galore. The man is a machine.

If there’s a sense — as is also the case with Ritchie’s sometime collaborator Jason Statham — that the director has Made His Film Again, that charge does not feel unfounded here. Like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare or Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, it has a caper-ish tone and a goofy approach; like his earlier geezerish efforts Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, it’s high on laddy bants and alpha male energy. Yet our protagonist here is an unusual one for a Ritchie hero: a pen-pushing lawyer, and rare female presence in his normally very blokey work, albeit a woman surrounded almost entirely by very blokey characters.

As she explains to us in an overwritten narration, Rachel Wild (Eiza González) is a no-nonsense lawyer who exists in the grey of the title, operating in the area between what is strictly legal and what is not. She works with ultra rich clients plucked from the 1% of the 1% — this is obviously not the film to explore themes of global wealth inequality — in order to recover assets in the billions. Rachel’s firm uses all kinds of tactics at their disposal: from clever legal pressures to those of the more bang-bang-shoot-shoot variety. For the slightly more off-the-books stuff, she hires her trusted fixers, the colourfully named Sid (Henry Cavill) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal), who have teams which specialise in “extraction, intimidation, and sabotage,” and “corruption, bribery and covert surveillance”, respectively.

Despite featuring a plot about the strategic deployment of extrajudicial legal mechanisms exerting pressure on debtors, this is no slow-burn Grisham-esque potboiler. Indeed, it has the trappings of a heist movie, with its playful score, glamorous locations, Q-branch-style gadgetry and best laid plans. One such scheme is presented to us while Rachel makes a ‘Stovetop Negroni Svegliato’, as on-screen titles helpfully inform us — just to emphasise how glossy and chic and exciting this legal work is.

As with many heist films, it is all exposition and barely anything in the way of character; Cavill and Gyllenhaal are given free rein to run on charm autopilot (all we learn of Sid is that his nickname is ‘Captain Sensible’) while Rachel is just straightforwardly competent, almost never making a mistake. There is one scene where the gang get into a bit of jeopardy but Ritchie’s script (he is the only credited writer, his first sole screenwriting credit in nearly 20 years, since 2008’s RockNRolla) is too enamoured with these slick, sexy characters to let them get into harm’s way. They simply plan for every eventuality to recover their money from scowling ’80s-era baddie Salazar (Carlos Bardem), and absolutely do so.

Is it nonsense? Of course it is. Is it predictable? Almost entirely. Is it funny? Not really, except in a slightly try-hard manner. Is it even remotely memorable? Not in the slightest. Does it plod along at a jolly old pace, with muscular action setpieces and a runtime that doesn’t outstay its welcome? It’s a Guy Ritchie film. Of course it does.