With In the Grey, Guy Ritchie Would Rather Confuse Us Than Entertain Us

Perhaps Guy Ritchie is the Wes Anderson of lunkhead action movies. He loves his narrative curlicues, and he loves gamifying his set pieces, even if those set pieces ultimately devolve into everything getting blowed up real good. In the director’s entertaining Sherlock Holmes movies, the detective-hero would slow a confrontation down in his head and start calculating the physics of his adversary’s movements before delivering a beatdown. Ritchie’s heist movies are often full of the kind of obsessive preplanning better suited to precocious schoolkids than the jacked bruisers and gabby blokes that actually populate those films. In his latest, In the Grey, Ritchie takes this compulsive, hyperanalytical love of preparation to comical levels. Intentionally, but maybe not productively: As the screen fills up with lists and the narrative overloads on data, we may find our attention drifting.

Maybe there’s no other way to make a movie about people who track down billionaires who don’t pay their bills. In the Grey’s crack squad of heavily armed, high-end debt collectors is led by Rachel Wild (Eiza González), a freelance agent who finds ways to convince ruthless international businessmen to pay back the massive loans they owe to their asset managers. This time, she’s after a murderous gangster named Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem), who has his own island and private army. To compel Salazar, she must untangle his network of legal and illegal operations and then essentially hold some of his businesses hostage until he pays up. Her chief lieutenants in this operation are Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Sid (Henry Cavill), who specialize in intimidation, surveillance, bribery, and other assorted sins.

I’d describe what these guys actually do in this film, but I’m not exactly clear myself. Suffice it to say that port superintendents are bribed, the Saudi police get involved (the Saudis co-financed the film), assorted construction projects are frozen, and Salazar starts to hemorrhage money, which allows Rachel to extort him. As the film bounces between different countries and Rachel’s complicated plan comes together, we are presumably meant to be delighted with everything clicking into place — but it’s more likely that we’ve already clocked out of the story. To make everything even more Guy Ritchie–riffic, the director intercuts some of these scenes with a recipe for a stovetop negroni svegliato, complete with the ingredients flashing on the screen. A cute touch, but in this case it’s like a dancer attempting one last elaborate bow to his audience while trying to ignore that his legs have broken off and the theater has burned down. 

A touch of narrative confusion doesn’t always have to be the kiss of death, especially if you have style and personality. Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme also presents us with ornate financial schemes, but it doesn’t lose us emotionally, and it always gives us something fun to look at. Ritchie does retain some visual panache (In the Grey is a colorful movie, at least, the title notwithstanding), but his characters feel dead on arrival. Bronco and Sid are supposed to be loyal partners, and Gyllenhaal and Cavill are both good actors who’ve done excellent work with Ritchie in the past (Gyllenhaal in The Covenant, Cavill in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), but there’s no spark between them here. Meanwhile, Rachel has been written as such a confident badass that González isn’t given anything to do except stare and make bold declarations; she gets plenty of screen time, but it’s a robotic part. The movie clocks in at 97 minutes and was reportedly shot in 2023, and it’s currently being dumped into theaters by Black Bear after Lionsgate decided not to release it last year, so maybe all the interesting stuff was cut along the way.

There was probably a way to simplify this narrative, but Ritchie doesn’t seem to care about that: He loves jumping between timelines and overloading us with arcana, including, at one point, a bewilderingly long list that outlines every single piece of equipment that our heroes have brought to Salazar’s island (and which, no surprise, they will eventually wind up using in the film’s uninspiring and cacophonous climax). As the screen fills with playful text identifying everything from missiles to grenade launchers to all-terrain vehicles and off-road motorcycles (and, of course, beer), we might wonder if the director is distracting us like this because he ultimately doesn’t have anything interesting to say. Or maybe he does but isn’t sure how to get there. There were times during the stylized deviations of In the Grey that I began to wonder if the movie’s head-scratching overintricacy was meant to evoke the complicated nature of modern global finance. But then my head hurt and I began to think about the ride back home.