The last time Ryan Gosling was sent to murder a guy in Bangkok was about nine years ago, when he starred in Nicolas Winding Refn's sick-puppy art-thriller "Only God Forgives." I kind of loathed that movie, though it did have awesome red wallpaper and a hilariously foul-mouthed Kristin Scott Thomas, which helped the portentous vibes and extreme carnage go down. And of course it had Gosling, cast not for the first or last time as a handsome cipher with a knack for killing people. He gives us another one of those ciphers in the new Netflix espionage thriller "The Gray Man," which is the first movie to make me consider watching "Only God Forgives" again, perhaps to offer or even seek my own forgiveness.
"The Gray Man" was directed by brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, though it's such a synthetic, soulless bundle of goods that it barely feels touched by human hands. Full of smirking one-liners, blink-and-you-miss-'em international locations and acts of gratuitously unpleasant (if more implied than seen) violence, it's basically Netflix Winding Refn; it's globe-trotting comic nihilism for the whole streaming-loving family. It has a bunch of supporting players pulled from the Netflix rotation: Wagner Moura from "Narcos," Regé-Jean Page of "Bridgerton," Jessica Henwick from "Iron Fist" and the upcoming "Glass Onion." It also has the murky, heavily processed digital look of more than a few so-called Netflix originals, the ones that come flaunting a blockbuster price tag yet somehow still look indefensibly cut-rate on a proper movie screen.
For all that, "The Gray Man" will actually be playing in theaters before it begins streaming on Netflix on July 22. Because the violence is generally bloodless and murkily shot, the movie has even been granted a PG-13 rating, which seems a bit lax for a movie in which Billy Bob Thornton gets his fingernails ripped out. I have no idea whether that particular torture scene comes from the source material, not having read "The Gray Man" or any other novels in the series by Mark Greaney, a protege of the late Tom Clancy. I also don't know whose idea it was to throw a screaming teenager with a heart condition repeatedly into harm's way — a choice that might have felt more defensible in a movie that didn't expect us to chortle merrily at every fresh burst of mayhem.
