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The Gray Man

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Watch The Gray Man with a subscription on Netflix.

What to Know

The Gray Man has the star-studded outline of an entertaining action thriller, but it's filled in with lukewarm leftovers from far better films.

Add this one to your queue with confidence, action fans: The Gray Man has a great cast, exciting set pieces, and a solid story.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Anthony Russo

Ryan Gosling

Chris Evans

Lloyd Hansen

Ana de Armas

Dani Miranda

Regé-Jean Page

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‘The Gray Man’ Review: Guy vs. Guy

Ryan Gosling plays a blasé government operative opposite Chris Evans’s showy psychopath in this globe-trotting spy action movie.

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By Amy Nicholson

The frenetic caper “The Gray Man,” from the directors Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, boasts more vibrant color than the typical globe-trotting shoot-em-up about the C.I.A., a distinctly drab organization. The Russos’ lead, an agent known as Six (Ryan Gosling), wears a snazzy red suit with matching fingernail polish to his first onscreen assassination. Six works for his freedom, not his 401(k): He is a convicted murderer who was plucked from prison by a government suit (played by Billy Bob Thornton) and placed in a secret kill squadron. He seems to be OK with the deal, despite showing a light layer of fatigue that Gosling wears like a rain poncho.

The Russos’ more-is-more filmmaking ethos leaves little room for Gosling to explore Six’s complexities. Six’s opening hit goes askew, shattering his job security. And as this extravagant adventure sprints across 10 countries, including Thailand and Azerbaijan, Six remains unflappably blasé. “I get it, you’re glib,” Thornton’s character says to him. So is every other person in the movie, a funny, if indistinguishable, blitz of quipping colleagues, snarky villains (including the main bad guy, a heavy played by Chris Evans) and a hardened cancer patient (Alfre Woodard) who glowers, “If you say anything even remotely sympathetic, I will shoot you.”

The film’s writers — Joe Russo along with Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, frequent collaborators on the brothers’ films — have created a screenplay that is an assault of amusement; a barrage of bullets and one-liners. The razzle-dazzle does quite a bit to invigorate what is at its core a routine tale. (It comes as no shock that the real enemy is, as ever, the C.I.A. itself, in a story that contains no fewer than three all-too-convenient explosions.) Yet the frenzy is also distracting to the brink of self-sabotage. An early fight scene is jazzed with so many spliced-in shots of smoke and fireworks that one worries the Russos are insecure about Gosling’s ability to execute his stunts. Thankfully, the film grows in confidence and inventiveness. In later sequences, Six doggedly rescues himself from a tumbling plane, a trap door and a set of handcuffs.

Gosling and Evans appear to have made an effort to build biceps even bigger than the barrels of their automatic rifles. Evans, whom the Russos have directed as Captain America several times, appears delighted to play a self-proclaimed sociopath who is so bloodthirsty that actual sociopaths ought to sue for defamation. “Ho ho ho!” he chortles, firing a machine gun. The character is too outrageous for any believable menace, but Evans gives him a mustachioed gusto.

The caffeinated cuts and pacing never allow the audience to find its footing in the film’s large, expensive set pieces, which prevents the action from becoming truly thrilling. The best brawl is one of the smallest: It centers on two supporting players (Ana de Armas and Dhanush , a star of Tamil cinema) who strangle each other with a single cable at the same time. Note the moment during a strenuous tramway shootout when Six uses the reflection in a mirrored building to defeat a goon — it’s a clever detail in a film careening full speed ahead.

The Gray Man Rated PG-13 for sprees of violence and profanity. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

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'The Gray Man' Review: Gosling and Evans Face Off in Best Netflix Action Movie Yet

Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans and Ana de Armas go head to head in an explosive thriller from the Russo brothers that's already confirmed a sequel and spinoff.

Ryan Gosling switches to action mode in Netflix shoot-'em-up The Gray Man.

That's more like it. Following a string of wildly popular but not very good action movies (Red Notice, Extraction), Netflix delivers with The Gray Man, streaming now. This rip-roaring and star-powered spy romp from the Russo brothers throws all the money at the screen as Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans go head to head.

Having played in some theaters and streaming on Netflix since Friday, July 22, The Gray Man has already been successful enough for Netflix to confirm a sequel (with Gosling returning) and spinoff (from the writers of Deadpool).

The Gray Man opens with Gosling in prison two decades ago, wisecracking at Billy Bob Thornton's unflappable CIA spook. "We get it, you're glib," Thornton responds, but as Gosling contemplates a life of murder for the government, his eyes soften mournfully. And when we catch up to Gosling in the modern day, now a slick killing machine known only as Sierra 6, he's a jaded shell only good for dispatching nameless bad actors who got on the wrong side of Uncle Sam. Except he finds himself at odds with his calculating boss after he refuses to endanger a child.  

Woah woah woah. Seriously? In this, the year 2022, we're still making movies about assassins who go rogue because they won't kill a kid?

OK, fine. So anyway, Gosling comes into conflict with Chris Evans' unhinged mercenary as they're both sent to retrieve a vital USB drive, and --

Hang on, hang on. No. I'm not having it. A USB drive? After 60 years of James Bond on screen , after six (and counting) Mission: Impossible movies, a spy movie hinges on a frickin' thumb drive!

So yeah. On paper, The Gray Man has all the elements of a formulaic spy genre (and I do mean all the elements -- there's about four movies' worth of stuff going on). Thumb drives. A kidnapped niece. Bureaucrats who are the real villains. Wet teams striding across airfields in body armor. Action scenes cutting to analysts panicking in front of walls of monitors. Tense phone calls in skyscrapers. Rooftop helipads and secure lines and guys making the bullets fall out of a gun before the other guy can shoot him. 

But as yet another city name blares across the screen in massive letters, you start to wonder if the filmmakers are mocking the conventions of the spy genre. Directors Joe and Anthony Russo, the men behind several of Marvel's Captain America and Avengers movies, are very self-aware about the type of flick they're making. The quippy banter and sharp action are heightened and stylized, and just a ton of fun. We get it, they're glib. 

That's what sets The Gray Man apart from formulaic plods like Extraction or Amazon's turgid Without Remorse . From the opening scene, in which Gosling goes into battle in a crisp scarlet suit twirling a water pistol, to his silent silhouetted dispatching of a platoon of bodyguards with whatever cutlery comes to hand, the flick has swagger to burn. Don't be fooled by the title: There's nothing gray about the lush cinematography, kinetic camerawork and playful music. The Gray Man is up there with the stylized likes of Atomic Blonde, and might give John Wick a run for his money.

A big part of the film's success is the star wattage on display, Gosling and Evans (and super-charismatic guest star Dhanush) handling the action heroics and quippy banter with equal assuredness. Gosling plays it relatively straight, although Sierra 6's real name is Courtland Gentry, which means he has not one but two improbably cool action hero names. Evans hams it up for the both of them as a suavely unhinged torturer with a wardrobe of natty knitted polo shirts, like James Bond 's maladjusted little brother. His character, by the way, is called Lloyd Hanson, which is less cool than Sierra 6 but sticks in your mind because someone says it literally every 20 seconds.

I mention the names because Ana de Armas is also in this film, but I'm darned if I could tell you what her character's called. While the main guys have backstory (even if Evans' is just "went to Harvard"), her character doesn't have any motivating story that I can recall. The script doesn't even give her much of a personality apart from obligatory super-badassness, and being grumpy when guys yell at her. At least de Armas' appearance in Bond film No Time to Die was essentially a cameo, but this is a waste of the white-hot star of the moment.

The highlight of Ana de Armas' role is probably this suit.

This being an action flick, the many international stopovers lead to violence. It's all fun and games, obviously, all stylishly shot shootouts and rollicking punch-ups. But then there's a huge showdown in the streets of a European city. High-velocity rounds destroy homes. High-caliber death machines sweep crowded public squares. You might not see it, but regular normal people going about their everyday lives clearly get killed in horrible ways. In the wake of public shootings in the US, Denmark and Norway (and that's just this year) this callous ultraviolence hits different.

Maybe, just maybe, that's the point. After this apocalyptic battle, the film doesn't merrily exfil to the next exotic location. Instead, it lingers in a hospital, surrounded by the wounded and dying. Admittedly, this is partly a setup for the next fight. But The Gray Man at least shows a glimmer of thought about the savagery unfolding on screen, about the silver-screen depiction of violence as redemptive and protective, about the pointlessness of it all. It isn't exactly Drive or Only God Forgives, Gosling's 2011 and 2013 arthouse subversions (with director Nicolas Winding Refn) of the car chase and crime genres. But there's definitely a layer of subversive nuance going on here. It's telling that in this film's world of espionage, we never see any terrorists or doomsday weapons. The only threat to ordinary folk like you and me is the internal squabbling of various grubby sociopaths jockeying for power no matter who gets caught in the crossfire.

Ultimately, The Gray Man encourages us to enjoy the hell out of a stylish shoot-'em-up where good-looking people go bang-bang, while still nudging us to remember it's a fantasy. Maybe I'm squinting too hard to suggest this is Netflix's smartest action film, but it's definitely one of the most fun.

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The Gray Man Is the Most Expensive Movie Netflix Has Ever Made, and It’s … Fine

The gray man, played by Ryan Gosling, is an off-books government killer whose real name is Court Gentry, which sounds fake enough (Beau Monde Patrician? Noble Fancyperson?) to make the idea of a code name feel a little superfluous. But he has one of those, too: Sierra Six, which is a reference to the CIA program he’s recruited into at the start of the movie as well as a not-so-subtle nod to a certain globe-trotting spy. “007 was taken,” Six even quips at one point, and if openly pointing out that you’re a knockoff version of a famous character would feel like hubris in most other movies, well, The Gray Man is a Netflix original, and churning out brand-new properties that feel a lot like things you’ve seen before has become the streaming giant’s main jam. And in many ways, it sums up what Netflix is now pinning its cinematic future on.

Adapted from the first of a series of books by Mark Greaney, it’s meant to launch a franchise, and it’s directed by Marvel veterans the Russo brothers. It’s also the most expensive movie Netflix has ever made, though a huge part of that reported $200 million budget surely went to hefty payouts for Gosling (who hasn’t appeared in a movie since First Man in 2018), Chris Evans, and Ana de Armas. What’s left has been used to make something perfectly serviceable to leave on in the background while noodling on your phone, and I mean that as a compliment. Netflix’s previous attempt at an extravagantly priced star-driven action movie, Red Notice , felt like it was written by an AI and performed in front of green screens without ever requiring its stars to be in the same room. The Gray Man at least feels like a middling studio movie that wasn’t worth catching in theaters but that would comfortably fill an afternoon if you stumbled on it airing on cable.

He’s not actually very Bond-like, Six, despite the movie’s clear aspirations to be seen in that tradition. He falls somewhere between Jason Bourne and the title character in La Femme Nikita , a willing recruit to a secret program he doesn’t have a way to opt out of. When he’s first approached by a CIA bigwig named Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton), he’s in the midst of serving a life sentence in prison. Fitzroy tells him he’ll be trained “to kill bad guys,” and he says yes. Cut to an 18-years-later title card and he’s in Bangkok about to rendezvous with agent Dani Miranda (de Armas) at the behest of a Langley up-and-comer named Carmichael ( Bridgerton ’s Regé-Jean Page), who turns out to have nefarious intentions. Six’s intentions are less clear. Like all assassins, apparently, he has a heart of gold, but it only emerges when his own survival is placed at risk due to interagency politicking. He has a Bourne-like capacity for brutality and for weathering serious injuries, and the movie has a tendency to throw him into situations where he has to fight hand-to-hand, which admittedly end up looking better than the shootout sequences. But he also has a very un-Bourne-like tendency to crack jokes.

The Gray Man , which was scripted by Joe Russo, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely, is written like a comedy but never really played like one. Gosling laconically underdelivers wisecracks that would be unbearable if he leaned into them. “Where are you?” someone barks at him on the phone. “Emotionally?” he replies. I’ve missed him onscreen, and even when he’s operating in low-power mode, he makes enough unpredictable choices to be interesting. Evans makes up for him energy-wise and more, smirking his way through the role of the cartoonishly sociopathic Lloyd Hansen, a mustachioed private contractor hired by Carmichael whose preferred method of sending troops of armed men to shoot up very public space makes him seemingly unsuited for covert work. The movie spends a lot of time in a tonal purgatory where it’s never clear if it’s meant to be funny, and while its banter isn’t generally good enough for that to matter, it does end up undercutting the best gag, which is that Lloyd and Carmichael met not doing untoward fieldwork in the Balkans or something but at Harvard.

The plot, as much as there is one, involves a MacGuffin — a drive with incriminating evidence hidden inside a medallion — that takes the action from Turkey to Austria to the Czech Republic to Croatia with a stop in flashbacks to Hong Kong. De Armas is relegated again to a gal Friday role, with Alfre Woodard playing the small part of a retired CIA chief. Tamil celeb Dhanush is a mysterious mercenary in the kind of overtly pandering appearance that used to be reserved for Chinese stars meant to lure in international audiences (there’s no Netflix in China, but there is in India, a huge market the company has been struggling to capture). For all the movie’s resources, though, the big set pieces are depressingly incoherent. The Russos may have been responsible for one of the better fight scenes in the MCU, in the elevator in Captain America: The Winter Soldier , but here, they stage prolonged action sequences on a crashing plane and a moving tram that are boosted with sloppy computer-generated work and so little sense of where the characters are in relation to the spaces they’re in that there’s no tension at all.

Not that it matters. The Gray Man wraps up the way a TV pilot would, with shockingly little resolution and most of the characters returned to their starting positions to do this all over again in the inevitable sequel. It’s good enough for government work, but you understand why they might want to keep the numbers hush-hush.

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Ryan gosling and chris evans in netflix’s ‘the gray man’: film review.

The Russo brothers go big again with a spy-versus-spy thriller starring Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans and Ana de Armas.

By John DeFore

John DeFore

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The title of Mark Greaney’s novel The Gray Man (first in a best-selling series) refers to a quality that is as desirable for a spy as it is difficult to find in contemporary movies about their exploits: the ability to move through the world without being noticed, so unremarkable that those you interact with forget you as soon as you’re out of the room.

The Gray Man

Release date: Friday, July 15 (Netflix)

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jessica Henwick, Wagner Moura, Dhanush, Billy Bob Thornton, Alfre Woodard, Regé-Jean Page, Julia Butters, Eme Ikwuakor, Scott Haze

Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

Screenwriters: Joe Russo, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely

That ethic barely makes it into Joe and Anthony Russo ‘s stylish, supersized Netflix adaptation, whose hero ( Ryan Gosling ) wears attention-grabbing clothes and attracts the kind of mayhem that shuts entire cities down (not to mention being so handsome that the spooks in a John le Carré operation would never let him out in the field.) A side character expounds on the value of blending in, but even he wears one-in-a-million facial hair and lives in a building designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser, an artist who made Gaudí look tame. While the movie itself may prove nearly as unmemorable as its hero ostensibly wants to be, it’s anything but inconspicuous.

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Gosling plays Court Gentry, who was in prison for murder when the CIA’s Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) recruited him as a black-ops assassin. Now he’s Sierra Six, the last working member of Fitzroy’s Dirty Dozen -style Sierra crew. The first time we see him in action, we may marvel at the fact that he has made it this far. His assignment, one of the most ridiculously contrived in the history of hitman flicks, involves using a rifle the size of a jackhammer to shoot up through the ceiling at a man two floors above him — a target who just seconds ago was walking around in the open. When a child arrives on the scene, Six aborts the mission and kills the guy the old-fashioned way.

But while he’s still breathing, the victim reveals that he’s a former Sierra man himself, targeted because he has a flash drive with evidence proving that the Agency’s group chief Denny Carmichael ( Bridgerton ‘s Regé-Jean Page) is killing people around the world for his own shadowy purposes. Knowing Six now has the drive, Carmichael paints him as a rogue and sends all his spies off to kill him.

Enter Chris Evans , star of the Russos’ best films ( Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Civil War ) and their most bloated ( Avengers: Endgame ). Appearing to have lots of fun playing against type, Evans is Lloyd Hansen, a psychopath so amoral even the CIA fired him; now he’s a mega-rich freelancer Carmichael calls as a last resort. Working out of a French castle set on 19,000 acres, he’s a torture-happy ham with an infinite budget and no scruples.

The Evans/Russo pairing isn’t the only reunion here. Gosling’s Blade Runner 2049 co-star Ana de Armas joins him as Dani Miranda, an agent whose career is jeopardized by all this, but who decides to help Six despite her doubts. The actors’ chemistry from that film doesn’t carry over here, but Miranda does at least get to save Six enough times to make him feel inadequate. The part is more prominent than de Armas’ action-hero turn in No Time to Die , but the Bond role had more personality.

Speaking of Bond: Gray Man certainly wants to compete with him and Ethan Hunt in terms of globe-trotting action, novel locations and wild set pieces; it’s a very expensive ambition that doesn’t always pay off. A sequence in which Six gets stuck on a cargo plane that is falling apart as he fends off killers, for instance, can’t approach the bonkers thrill of similar action in Roseanne Liang’s pulpy Shadow in the Cloud ; a very long gunfight in Prague’s Old Town, with an endless supply of assassins somehow failing to kill our guy, feels like a John Wick castoff.

Occasionally, a grace note will upstage all the explosions and bloodshed around it — the use of a reflection to kill a hidden attacker, for instance. But the screenplay’s clever moments are often predictable, like a loudly telegraphed bit of business involving a character’s pacemaker.

That character (Fitzroy’s niece, kidnapped by Hansen) is played by Julia Butters, of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood . Though the Tarantino film gave her a more credible precocious-kid role, a child’s presence here is valuable, and not just because trying to rescue her makes Six look noble. Rather, a scene in which he quietly protects her is one of the film’s few bits of human-scale violence, in which Gosling (making a welcome big-screen comeback four years after First Man ) can show the calm-but-deadly stuff this man is made of. (A later hand-to-hand fight sequence, featuring the Indian multihyphenate Dhanush, is similarly valuable, though it ends very implausibly.)

Predictably, the film is most fun when Gosling and Evans engage directly or via intermediaries. It gets less appealing when we’re in command centers, watching intelligence officers try to cover their asses. Alfre Woodard shines in her short time onscreen as Fitzroy’s old ally. But Page and Jessica Henwick, who both have plenty of screen time (Henwick plays Carmichael’s deputy), struggle with thinly written characters and rote power plays.

Working with longtime collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, Joe Russo has dramatically changed the action of the book; as with the Jack Reacher adaptation starring Tom Cruise, the author’s many fans may not recognize what they see here. So it’s smart that, while early reports (and showbiz logic) suggested this will be the first of many Gray Man outings, the movie’s action does little to set that expectation. Letting this be a stand-alone adventure may be artistically wise. And with all the belt-tightening and revenue-seeking going on at Netflix, saying no to a crazy-expensive sequel might not even offend the artists involved.

Full credits

Distributor: Netflix Production companies: AGBO, Roth/Kirschenbaum Films Cast: Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jessica Henwick, Wagner Moura, Dhanush, Billy Bob Thornton, Alfre Woodard, Regé-Jean Page, Julia Butters, Eme Ikwuakor, Scott Haze Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo Screenwriters: Joe Russo, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely Producers: Joe Roth, Jeffery Kirschenbaum, Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, Mike Larocca, Chris Castaldi Director of photography: Stephen F. Windon Costume designer: Judianna Makovsky Editor: Jeff Groth Composer: Henry Jackman Casting directors: Sarah Finn, Krista Husar

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‘The Gray Man’ Review: Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans Try to Out-Kill Each Other in This Spectacular Netflix Fireworks Show

Production budgets swell, stock prices go down, but Netflix subscribers are the big winners in this Bond-level summer blockbuster from the Russo brothers.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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At age 13, Ryan Gosling was spreading cheer on “The Mickey Mouse Club.” But something must have snapped in the dozen years between “The Notebook” and “La La Land.” The Canadian heartthrob seems committed to convincing us that he can be a cold-blooded, even-keeled, unsentimental killer. Starting with Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive,” followed by the Danish director’s “Only God Forgives” and now playing the title character in the Russo brothers’ “ The Gray Man ,” an actor who once radiated charisma in “Crazy Stupid Love” has been perfecting an inexpressive cool that borders on nihilism, keeping his pulse stable and poker face fixed as he offs whatever adversaries come his way.

Gosling doesn’t just want to be an action star; he wants to be the Hollywood version of Alain Delon, the handsome French icon who played a sociopath with perfect cheekbones in “Purple Noon” and a hit man with no visible emotions in “Le Samouraï.” “The Gray Man” is the payoff of Gosling’s low-key reinvention: an incredibly expensive, stunningly executed action vehicle in which he plays Six, an ex-con-turned-CIA assassin who’s so good at his job that he becomes a kind of liability, landing him at the top of the agency’s kill list.

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A reportedly $200 million whopper that Netflix will release first in theaters (on July 15) and then a week later on its streaming service, this is “Avengers: Endgame” directors Anthony and Joe Russo ’s answer to the James Bond franchise (which reached its end game, with Daniel Craig at least, in last year’s “No Time to Die”). “The Gray Man” has the huge, globe-trotting heft of that franchise and a few can’t-be-accidental overlaps — but more on that in a moment. Most important, in co-star (and ex-Captain America) Chris Evans , it has a villain who’s as flamboyantly over-the-top as Gosling is understated.

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Both play professional killers who operate outside the limits of what is legally acceptable — lurking off the grid, in the shadowy “gray zone” that offers the CIA plausible deniability for any murders they commit. Neither has a license to kill, exactly, though both do so at the behest of the same boss: newly appointed CIA group chief Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page).

Gosling’s nameless character was recruited straight out of prison by old-timer Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) as part of the experimental Sierra program. The idea: Take convicted killers and turn them into strategic assassins, offering them “freedom” in exchange for a kind of obligatory service to the agency. It sounds like a reckless, doomed-to-fail idea, though subtle clues — and later, more overt flashbacks — reveal that the crime that landed Gosling’s Sierra Six behind bars was a relatively moral one.

Six (not to be confused with 007) is a killer with a conscience, even if most of his hits are ordered from above, requiring no real judgment on his part. On the other hand, Evans’ Lloyd Hansen is a contract killer with an appetite for torture who relishes any opportunity to flout the rules.

In the film’s first hit, set in fluorescent-lit Bangkok, Six and fellow agent Dani Miranda ( Ana de Armas ) have been ordered to take out a mark at a flashy New Year’s Eve party. The Russos trust that their audience has seen a million films like this (the operation recalls the opening of James Cameron’s “True Lies” and even Netflix’s recent “Red Notice”). Cinematographer Stephen F. Windon shoots the action from a distance, emphasizing the choreography and staging over the immersive, rough-and-tumble logistics of a fist fight.

So much of “The Gray Man” depends on the its-in-our-DNA familiarity with action films and conspiracy thrillers, allowing the screenplay (credited to Joe Russo, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely) to take short cuts and logic leaps over far-fetched twists, like Six’s discovery that he’d been ordered to take out Sierra Four. It seems there’s been a regime change at the agency: Fitzroy and bureau chief Margaret Cahill (Alfre Woodard) are out, and Carmichael is dismantling the Sierra program one assassin at a time. Before Six completes his assignment, Four passes him a USB drive with incriminating evidence — the movie’s MacGuffin. And so the game of high-stakes hot potato begins.

Unlike the latest Bond installment (which subverted the stakes on an essentially invincible hero, proving him to be mortal after all), audiences are not seriously concerned for Six’s life. From the start, Fitzroy made clear that he was “disposable.” Once Six realizes his contract is up, he calls his old boss and quips, “I know there wasn’t some palm trees and 401(k) planned for me, but tell me you guys had some exit strategy.” Lloyd Hansen is his exit strategy, and this nutter will stop at nothing to snuff Six and steal the drive.

There’s nothing terribly original about the storytelling. Take a little of “Shooter,” a lot of “John Wick,” add a dash of Jason Bourne, shaken (but not stirred) into the license-to-kill formula, and you’ve got the basic idea. What makes “The Gray Man” exciting — and let’s not beat around the bush: This is the most exciting original action property Netflix has delivered since “Bright” — are the shades the ensemble bring to their characters and the little ways in which the Russos come through where those other films fell short.

In a too-small supporting role, de Armas was one of the best things about “No Time to Die.” Here, the Russos give her considerably more to do. Whether blasting helicopters with a rocket launcher or rescuing Six in a cherry red Audi RS7, she’s up to the task. In another overlap, rumors have hinted that Page could fill Bond’s shoes — so why not cast him as the movie’s dapper puppetmaster? Instead of giving us the umpteenth variation on a supervillain bent on world domination, “The Gray Man” serves us something far scarier: It reinforces our distrust in peacekeeping institutions, while deputizing a lunatic mercenary (in Evans) willing to take out cops, civilians and entire city blocks in his bid to nix Six.

Gosling takes it all in stride, keeping his expressions as passive as possible throughout — apart from two scenes in which he breaks the Noh mask to wink at Fitzroy’s teenage niece (Julia Butters), taken hostage by Hansen. That’s a cheap child-endangerment detail (again, no worse than “No Time to Die”) in an otherwise serious-minded blockbuster outing, which is strongest when serving up international set-pieces: the Bangkok hit, a high-altitude extraction-turned-escape, a Vienna double-cross and the epic showstopper in Prague, where Six sits handcuffed to a stone bench while the world’s deadliest assassins converge, sparking a crosstown firefight on a runaway tram. A memorable action movie might deliver just one of these scenes; “The Gray Man” pulls off all four, plus the castle-smashing Croatian finale, putting it on par with double-you-know-who.

“The Gray Man“ will be released in theaters July 15, before landing on Netflix on July 22.

Reviewed at Netflix screening room, Los Angeles, July 5, 2022. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 126 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release and presentation of an Agbo, Roth/Kirschenbaum Films production. Producers: Joe Roth, Jeffery Kirschenbaum, Joe Russo, Anthony Russo, Mike Larocca, Chris Castaldi. Executive producers: Patrick Newall, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, Jake Aust, Angela Russo-Otstot, Geoff Haley, Zack Roth, Palak Patel.
• Crew: Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo. Screenplay: Joe Russo, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely, based on the book by Mark Greaney. Camera:
• With: Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jessica Henwick, Wagner Moura, Dhanush, Billy Bob Thornton, Alfre Woodard, Regé-Jean Page, Julia Butters, Eme Ikwuakor, Scott Haze.

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