The Gray Man

Well at least this latest Netflix effort gives us some eye candy in the form of the annoyingly ageless Ryan Gosling and a slightly hammy Chris Evans, but the rest of it is derivative even by their standards. We start with a young man being released from prison by "Fitzroy" (Tommy Lee Jones) so he can join an elite CIA hit squad. Named "Six" (Gosling), his first mission is straight out of the "Mechanic" (2011) only it's an erstwhile colleague that he is sent to eradicate. A task that proves remarkably simple but is accomplished not before, luckily for us, he is given a micro chip that illustrates his new boss "Carmichael" (an underwhelming Regé-Jean Page) is about as crooked as the day is long. There now ensues a series of long "John Wick" style combat scenes as try as this hugely well equipped CIA operation does, it simply cannot capture "Six". Desperate times call for desperate measures so "Hansen" (Evans) is drafted in to finally do the business by kidnapping the easily accessible niece of the now retired TLJ, and using her as leverage he tries a different tack. Wholesale slaughter follows and along the way some lovely buildings in Prague and Croatia become neat piles of rubble; the local citizens are dropping like flies sending those in the CIA PR department into spasms... Well you get the gist. The always over-rated Ana de Armas sports quite a colourful suit at the start, but as usual her contributions are pretty unimpressive; TLJ is nowhere near his best and the thing lurches on towards a really inevitable conclusion that stretched out the thinnest of plots and showed a really disconcerting image of a CIA completely out of control, running rampage - and that scenario isn't remotely plausible. There is plenty of car-chasing, gunfights and pyrotechnic displays but that's nowhere near enough to compensate for a pretty unremarkable script and an amalgam of stories we have seen done better elsewhere, many times before. That said, if you get a chance to see it during it's limited cinema run then I'd give it a go. On television this is just subscription fodder with A-list cows that you will instantly forget.