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Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, and Ana de Armas co-star in a rote, routine action-thriller

With A-list stars Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, and (arguably A-list ) Ana de Armas, the multi-billion dollar grossing duo of Anthony and Joe Russo (Avengers: Endgame, Avengers: Infinity War, Captain America: The Winter Soldier) sharing directing duties, a $200 million budget—reportedly the highest in Netflix history—and a globe-trotting, city-hopping storyline, expectations were sufficiently high for The Gray Man. Given the track record of the Russo brothers, producers assumed they would deliver the next great action franchise by bringing the first novel in Mark Greaney’s spy series to the big screen. Unfortunately, those expectations were far too high, and the proposed Gray Man franchise seems poised to begin and end with a single underwhelming entry.

After an unnecessary expository prologue, The Gray Man centers on the title character, identified as Sierra Six (Gosling), a Bourne-like member of a secret CIA agency black-ops team, recruited from life in prison without parole to do the things (e.g., off-book murders) that will keep the red, white, and blue safe from harm. Sent to Bangkok to take out a black market profiteer, Six suffers an unexpected pang of conscience when the target surrounds himself with innocent civilians, including children. That’s enough to send off-site team leader Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page) into a visible paroxysm of rage.

For Carmichael, a little collateral damage is a small price to pay to keep America safe and, more importantly, to keep vital government secrets from ending up in the wrong hands. Six’s temporary field partner, Dani Miranda (de Armas), initially backs his play, but before long, Six makes the split-second decision to uncover the truth behind the target’s last words, leaving him with only his ex-handler Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) as a potential ally. In response, Carmichael sends a small army of mostly faceless mercenaries led by Lloyd Hansen (Evans), an ex-CIA operative, full-time sociopath, and all-around sadist, to track and eliminate Six with extreme prejudice.

If that’s not enough (and it isn’t), the screenplay credited to Joe Russo, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely—though a phalanx of well-paid, uncredited script doctors also helped—throws Fitzroy’s sickly, orphaned niece Claire (Julia Butters) into the mix. Claire’s presence in The Gray Man is meant to soften or humanize the taciturn, stoic Six. A man of fewer words and even fewer facial expressions, Six represents a familiar genre convention: the ruthlessly efficient killing machine with a soft spot for children and small animals. Here, though, the screenplay does little to develop Claire and Six’s relationship beyond a heart-tugging flashback where Six proves his bona fides as the best bodyguard government money can buy.

Along the way, Hansen talks and talks, quipping his way through one torture scene after another. With a high-and-tight haircut, a closely trimmed mustache, and ankle-exposing slacks, Hansen won’t be confused with anything approaching a real-world analogue, but it’s also just as obvious that Evans relishes playing an outsize villain instead of the straight-arrow superhero he’s played time and time again as Captain America. It’s surprising, then, that The Gray Man puts Six and Hansen in the same frame only twice, once at the mid-point and again at the climax.

A better thought-out film would have leveraged the contrast between Six and Hansen. It also would have put them in more than just two scenes together. A better thought-out film would have likely jettisoned the Claire/Six storyline and elevated Dani to co-equal status. That film, though, exists only in an alternate universe. What’s left onscreen is an unwieldy, clumsy mess, fitfully leaping from elaborately choreographed set pieces to expository dramatic scenes, some more cringe- and/or groan-inducing than others. The inevitable extended climax then leads to a too long, logic-defying, self-indulgent denouement.

It’s all the more unfortunate and disappointing that Gosling, one of cinema’s most magnetic, charismatic presences, gets little to do dramatically and is practically wasted in the role. To be fair, Gosling handles the physical demands of the performance without breaking anything approaching a noticeable sweat as he goes through action hero poses. Evans does too, though his physicality isn’t exploited nearly as much or as well as it should be. His Hansen does talk up a good game, though.

The Gray Man opens theatrically on Friday, July 15th, and streams on Netflix on Friday, July 22nd.

Co-writer, producer, and star Dana Abraham just misses the psychological horror mark

Opening a film with a character dragging a blood-splattered ax around an underlit room qualifies as, if nothing else, attention-grabbing, promising both a mystery and hopefully its answer. Unfortunately, director Rouzbeh Heydari (Cypher, Together Again), working from a script co-written by lead actor Dana Abraham, fails to live to the promise of that opening scene in Neon Lights, a giallo-influenced psychological horror thriller. Subsequent scenes involving Abraham’s character, tech genius Clay Amani, teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown go straight through to a virtual psychic implosion, real and imagined violence, and the occasional dismemberment or death.

Wrenched back into an unclear level of reality, Clay sits at a make up chair, readying himself for an on-air interview that will either help him retain his title as CEO of Tempest Tech or lead to his removal for emotional and mental instability. A counselor of sorts in a red dinner jacket, Denver Kane (Kim Coates), hovers nearby, cajoling Clay to straighten his spine, get his act (temporarily) together, and deliver the kind of steady, confidence-boosting performance needed to keep Clay’s life from falling into an abyss of his own apparent making.

Unsurprisingly, the interview doesn’t go well, leading to Clay’s sudden disappearance and a frantic call to his estranged family—James (Stephen Tracey), Benny (René Escobar Jr.), Benny’s wife, Clarissa (Brit MacRae), and Benny and Clarissa’s bookish teen daughter, Blair (Erika Swayze)—at a predictably remote country estate. It’s been ten years since Clay’s seen or talked to his family. Somehow, though, they decide to drop everything to join him at his estate, either from a mix of curiosity (morbid or otherwise) or the usual venality and greed associated with estranged families when a long-lost prodigal sibling has become obscenely wealthy and powerful.

Given Clay’s obvious mental instability and his family’s not particularly sympathetic reaction, it’s not long before dinnertime conversation devolves into accusations, insults, and an abrupt ending. Almost as quickly, violence enters the film, sometimes obliquely and sometimes directly, with frequent cuts to Clay and his therapist, Laila Mori (Brenna Coates), suggesting that Clay’s experiences may be more subjective, metaphorical, or figurative than they are real. This development pushes Clay in the direction of the unreliable narrator while he is the obfuscatory center of attention.

That’s all well and good, but Neon Lights does little with this premise or its elaboration, relying on Abraham’s outside-in, tic-heavy approach to sell Clay’s mental deterioration and eventual psychological disintegration. It works until it doesn’t, a sign that Abraham the co-screenwriter repeatedly lets down Abraham the actor. Abraham and Heydari also let down the remainder of the cast, forcing them into redundant scenes that don’t reveal individual characters as much as repeat single traits until the result, intentional or not, leads to tedium and an ambiguous yet predictable denouement.

While Neon Lights consistently suffers from an underwritten, deliberately elusive screenplay, at least it looks good visually thanks to Dmitry Lopatin’s color-drenched cinematography and Alexandra Lord’s production. Composer Josh Skerritt’s classically inspired, memorable score also deserves some mention. Individually and collectively, Lopatin, Lord, and Skerritt help to elevate Neon Lights beyond also-ran status into watchable territory. Their contributions, though, suggest that sometimes the sum might not be greater than the parts, but the opposite just might be.

Neon Lights is available to rent or purchase on digital or on-demand.

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Magdalena Lauritsch writes and directs a future-set apocalyptic space drama

In Magdalena Lauritsch’s uneven, sometimes compelling feature-length debut, Rubikon, the world ends not with a nuclear apocalypse, killer cyborgs, or time-travel paradoxes, but with environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, and corporate-run authoritarianism. It’s certainly nothing we haven’t seen before, and with the recent reactionary rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, may be a more likely scenario than not. Under Lauritsch’s steady hand comes a necessary, even urgent cautionary tale wrapped inside a tense (and occasionally intense) chamber piece set on an orbiting space station, humanity’s last, desperate hope for survival. All signs in Rubikon, however, point in the opposite direction: We did this to ourselves, and we’re now reaping what we sowed.

When we first meet Hannah Wagner (Julia Franz Richter), an uber-competent soldier and officer for an unnamed corporate state, she’s calmly piloting a command module without the aid of an AI-supported navigation system as it attempts to dock on the space station. Even as her passenger, Gavin Abbott (George Blagden), an environmentalist, chemist, and the scion of one of Earth’s last remaining wealthy families, panics at the precariousness of their predicament, Wagner keeps her cool, a character trait that will serve her extremely well as she must rely on her intelligence, ingenuity, and integrity to survive the likely end of the world. She succeeds in docking the module with the space station, but the broken navigation system signals the first of several cascading problems, each one worst than the last.

Wagner and Abbott ostensibly have been sent to the space station to replace most of its five-person crew. They’re scheduled to return to Earth along with the all-important algae cultures that promise to solve the planet’s lack of breathable air. With the addition of Wagner and Abbott, the five-person crew briefly becomes seven, eventually settling into three when all but one member of the crew, Dimitri Krylow (Mark Ivanir), the chief scientist and researcher principally responsible for developing algae as a solution, remains behind. Even as the outgoing crew members prepare to leave, however, an ominous-looking blanket brown fog begins to envelop the Earth, spelling doom for the last remaining inhabitants living in filtered “air domes.” Those air domes, however, are apparently incapable of filtering out the new, far more toxic fog.

With the Earth on the precipice, Wagner, Abbott, and Krylow face an ethical and moral dilemma of potentially life-altering consequences: stay on the space station and survive for an indeterminate amount of time thanks to the oxygen-producing algae cultures, or attempt an incredibly risky return to one of the last functioning air domes. It’s a basic “needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” dilemma, though neither Wagner, Abbott, nor Krylow put it quite that way. It’s that central conflict, with the three taking different, shifting sides of the problem, that figuratively drives Rubikon to its eventual, somewhat underwhelming conclusion.

The Austrian-born Lauritsch and her co-writers, Jessica Lind and Elisabeth Schmied, smartly complicate the central issue facing the trio by suggesting that what’s left of humanity—a socially, politically, and economically stratified society—might not be worth saving; even if it is worth saving, there’s no guarantee that once Wagner, Abbott, and Krylow return, they won’t be treated as expendable by the dome’s privileged leaders. There’s also the sense that Wagner, a lifelong soldier freed from the command structure that defined most of her adult life, is becoming increasingly independent, gaining agency and autonomy.

Rubikon falters, though, in its last stretch as the carefully delineated characters and their individual motivations grow increasingly muddled, in part due to English dialogue obviously written by non-native speakers. One character in particular makes a head-scratching decision that seems to be determined less by internal logic than by the exterior demands of the story. Still, there’s much to admire and respect here, from the near-perfect, spot-on production design that mixes technology from different eras, to the occasional seamless VFX shots of the Earth and the space station, to the all-too-brief scenes filled with escalating action and potential disaster.

Rubikon is available to rent or buy from the usual video-on-demand platforms.

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