A high-budget,action intensive filmin 2022 that doesn’t have an already established mega-property behind it has become something of a unicorn in Hollywood. For every ten renditions of Batman and new Ant-Man installments, original scripts seem to be appearing less and less and when they do, the reaction is often more polarizing than an aforementioned pop culture monolith.
Recent iterations of this kind of reaction could be seen withRed NoticeorCherry, and the inverse with Michael Bay’sAmbulance, where his usual critics began to praise his veer from the tropes that so heavily occupy popular filmmaking. The name of the game is source material, and if you don’t have that you’d better have access to an ever-dwindling studio budget.
The Russos' Post-Avengers Filmmaking
The Russo brothers, thankfully, had access to the latter with experience in the former, showcased earlier this year with their new filmThe Gray Man. Based on the 2009novel of the same name, the film follows Sierra Six (played by Ryan Gosling) and Lloyd Hanson (seen here as a now mustache-sporting Chris Evans) in an international cat-and-mouse game that reveals the true colors of Six’s agency.
The recipe here is one that upon a cursory glance needs no additives. A previous billion-dollar making directing duo, given one of the most daunting tasks in Hollywood in directing the latter twoAvengersfilms, set with a script well within their political thriller wheelhouse and a cast whose asking prices very well may have been half this film’s budget. So what went wrong? Why did Netflix not even report how much the film made in its limited 500-theater release (estimates are as low as $200,000)? How didThe Gray Manget a 48% Rotten Tomatoes score, and garner less opening weekend views thanThe Adam Project?
Star-Studded and Nowhere To Go
Turns out the puzzle pieces needed for this sort of thing may not always be as tangible as studios would like to imagine. For starters,The Gray Manexposes the qualities missed in those directors who aren’t outright great with actors. While no performance in this is downright unsavory, there’s a distinct lack of any real juice flowing through our starting lineup.
Related:The Gray Man: How Ryan Gosling is Progressing as an Action Star
Gosling is an exoskeleton of his normal, eternally stoic self. Chris Evans rattles off witty dialogue that behind his new facial hair reads as the maniacal plan of a Saturday morning cartoon villain (but at least he looks like he’s having fun), and eventhe generally great Ana De Armasand Billy Bob Thornton seem to only render fractions of their normal on-screen weight. For the Russos, honing in on developing characters — or even doing as much as putting them in focus — proves difficult after a slew of mega-star-studded films with little wiggle room for interpretation under the studio microscope.
The Russo Brothers, Left to Their Own Devices on Netflix
Artistic direction and mise en scène seem to be lacking once the directing duo are outside their Marvel base of operations (something also seen in their poorly received and forgotten recent filmsCherryand Joe Russo’sExtraction). Industry hearsay has had enough pieces of its mind shared over the years to reveal that the formulaic nature of said films may not entirely be coincidental. Reports of directors being required to go through re-shoots is not uncommon, but monopolized filmmaking has almost made it a guarantee that totally independent creative control has been something more or less tossed to the wayside.
Where before, Feige and the legion of high-ups at Marvel Studios would have the tone of the film laid out before anything, Joe and Anthony Russo were now left to their own devices when it came to this film’s overarching feeling. What direction of vision did they land on, you ask? Honestly, maybe none of them. The film has undeniable espionage aspects, but the rest of its cinematic elements seem more like stock properties than fleshed out ideas. It’s a movie that exists, but whose existence isn’t defined by anything other than your knowledge of its existence, a harrowing mode of film that’s seemed to become more common under the circumstance of the market.
The Marvel School of Fight Scenes
That is not to say that everything the Russos learned at the school of Marvel was for naught. Technicalities still exceed expectations here, with the choreography and sound mixing almost giving a secondhand concussion with every punch and roundhouse; the Russo specialty ofairtight shootout sequencesin the midst of some unnamed European city not yet leveled by the carnage of our protagonists. Visually and sonically, there is a lot still redeemable about this film.
Related:The Gray Man and the Case of Way Too Much Hype
However,The Gray Manseems to derive heavily from its directorial predecessorCaptain America: The Winter Soldier, minus the stars, stripes, and Helicarriers. That was a film which, at the time, was noted for the bait-and-switch pulled on audiences with S.H.I.E.L.D. and the narrative consequences caused by their demise. What happens when the Russos try this same script trick in their newest effort? Again, not a lot. That hollowness follows into the film’s lack of pathos, leaving a lot to be desired as far as investment.
The Gray Man and the Age of Average
The Gray Manis by no means a terrible movie. Perhaps the most negative thing it does is reveal the holes in the current filmmaking landscape, one which leaves screenwriters ill-prepared to make something truly organic. Stripped of a billion dollar budget (or $400 million, in the case ofAvengers: Endgame) and a slew of pre-written characters, the Russos seem to have trouble deciding if they want to make the next Bond flick, or if they’d rather be back in thewriters room ofCommunity, throwing quips at the wall. That’s one of the big problems with higher-budget action movies that aren’t part of a franchise property — they often seem purposeless, since the directors are now used to pre-packaged purpose.
This is not to say that the Russos' resume didn’t warrant their reception of the keys to the kingdom, it’s just that credibility has destroyed chance and risk-taking. All the skills honed in the realm of blockbusters can’t hide a lack of vision, something this and seemingly every other mega-budget,original and individual projectseems to have suffered from in recent memory. The worst thing a movie can be is average, something that only stays in your mind for a few hours before its existence and your investment in it are forgotten simultaneously, and that’s exactly what this film exposes about the modern blockbuster.
If a film doesn’t aspire to be everything, it ends up becoming nothing. Whether good, bad, or exceptionally one of the two, a film should always aspire to be the farthest thing from safe. Hopefully overlooking financial risk, the Russos and the suits at studios across Hollywood will soon realize the consequence of comfort.
