The Gray Man

Well, Red Notice's stars, Reynolds, Gadot and The Rock all gained $20 million each so fair guess the stars of this got similar. Maybe even the Russo's too given they're a big enough directorial name ATM.

I gotta stop watching these open chequebook Netflix blockbusters; every single one has been the most forgettable, artless, algorithmic wastes of space. Yet because my eyeballs contributed to their statistics I'm giving the service carte blanche to keep making these bloated time-wasters. I genuinely watched this with an open mind, on a lazy Sunday afternoon and with no expectations. I was ready to be pleasantly surprised.

Instead, what I watched was an overlong attempt at the espionage-action thriller by a pair of genuinely talentless hacks; brothers who have failed upwards 'cos they assembled (ho-ho) a bajillion superheroes into two movies & it didn't fly apart at the seams. Now. There is a lot to be said for the Competent Pair of Hands: the likes of Martin Campbell, Richard Donner and - to use modern examples - James Mangold or Christopher McQuarrie proved that you don't have to be some mad, visually inventive auteur to helm a crowdpleaser. Just know how to structure scenes, build a story's momentum - and knowing how to shoot action helps too. The Russo's chaotic over-editing killed every single action set-piece, robbing them of their tension and basic coherence. Swooping drone shots often disorienting, rather than thrilling - Michael Bay's own recent work demonstrating better use of this frontier-pushing technology.

The Netflix slushpile was obviously spent on the endless parade of whistle-stop visits to international locations, serving no real purpose except in a shameless attempt to Do a Bond - but Bond remembered to heighten the glamour of those foreign locales - not cover them with smoke & moody lighting for the sake of it. A big central location was a gloriously ostentatious palace, yet the Russo's shot it behind gloomy light, inexplicable smoke, and a tonne of fancy lighting.

And I didn't pick up the excitement for Ana DeArmis' character; she did nothing, except occasionally look pensive behind her stylish haircut; while Chris Evans' borderline cocaine-mania performance only distracted more than it entertained. We get it Chris, you don't wanna be typecast as Captain America; stop overcorrecting. The dialogue was generally awful, really trying for Shane Black style snark but none of it landed. "If you wanna make an omelette, you gotta kill some people". Okay. But that's this mess to a tee: The Russo's really, realllly wanted to bit a bit John Wick; a bit Shane Black; a bit Bond; a bit Bourne; a bit everything without ever making any of those ingredients work.

Basically what Johnny described: these Netflix films feel like humans never wrote the scripts, inasmuch as they were automatically generated based on metrics derived from Netflix's databases. Just "Content" we're meant to watch for a couple of hours, then oh, why not binge this series when you're done?

I've watched much worse films than The Gray Man in my time - but it's this constant stream of bland porridge Netflix tries to pass as Big Blockbuster Entertainment is whittling away my patience. Crazy money spent on something whose output is so banal, so much a shoulder-shrug - it ends up more offensive than something demonstrably terrible. At least a genuinely Bad Movie gives rise to discussion, jokes and so-bad-it's-good enjoyment on occasion.

Crazy to say, I miss the days when blockbusters were produced by executives blitzed out of their mind on cocaine; say what you will but you got some really batshít crazy films out of that period. The obsession for the 1980s means we keep getting these pastiches and "homages" without any of the actual creative vitality that spawned the originals in the first place.

It's not like Hollywood wasn't keen to appeal to demographics back then either - but it feels to have been taken to excess now; any rough edge or eccentricity sanded off 'til there's nothing left except superficiality. Probably comes from studios run by marketing executives rathe than movie moguls. As you say, producers like Don Simpson were behind an obscene number of crowd-pleasing classics of the 80s and 90s. And while they had their demographic box-ticks, the films often had a manic energy behind them, an energy that felt ... supplemented by drugs.

The film is based on a series of books so the runway is there to do sequels (never even heard of the novels before this film was announced so couldn't tell you much else).

But Netflix have tried this before; who remembers Bright 2? Exactly.