In The Grey (2026) – Greyscale Guy

Released: 15th May
Seen: 24th July

Some directors have a certain style that you come to expect when you hear that they’ve made a film. You go to a Hitchcock film and you expect a film full of suspense, you go to a Tarantino film and you expect something very violent with a lot of swearing that borrows a lot of aesthetics from old movies you’d find in a drive in, you go see a Uwe Boll film and you expect to see the cinematic equivalent of testicular cancer. A director gives you a good idea of what kind of film you can expect to see, so what do you expect when you hear that Guy Ritchie has made a new film? You expect something exactly like In The Grey, a film that is so obviously made by Guy Ritchie that he didn’t even need to bother putting his name on the film because it’s so clearly a film in his style that it couldn’t be anyone else… It’s also just kind of dull.

In The Grey is about a team of covert and absurdly quick witted operatives who have to take a lot of money from an incredibly rich man with an elaborate accent, just like almost all of Guy Ritchie’s crime films. In this film’s case the rich man is Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem) who owes a billion dollars to the asset management firm Spenser Goldstein, who uses their lawyer Rachel Wild (Eiza González) to get it back. Rachel brings in her goons, Sid (Henry Cavill) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) who basically run the entire operation which includes spying, sneaking around, messing with Salazar by taking his plane and boat away from him. Of course, there is eventually a big action scene where a lot of nameless extras get shot in the face because it wouldn’t be a crime film without mass casualties.

Like most Guy Ritchie films, In The Grey runs like everyone is on speed. Everyone is quick witted, quippy, talking a mile a minute and able to engage in sophisticated banter while firing whatever weaponry they happen to find nearby. Unlike the best Guy Ritchie films though, none of the quippy dialogue actually feels funny. It feels rote, like everyone learned these lines phonetically and is just getting through them with minimal effort (with the notable exception of Jake and Henry, but we will come back to that). Everything has been sped up somehow to 1.5 speed because we only have 100 minutes and have to get through so much, there is no time to laugh at a particularly funny line or marvel at a particularly interesting performance because everyone is just powering through trying to get to the end.

They’re also powering through because there is so much dialogue to get through, clearly someone doesn’t believe in the classic saying “Show don’t tell” because no one shuts the fuck up long enough to show anything. It’s all told, everything is just explained in laborious detail to the point where it becomes white noise. It gets to the point where you can close your eyes and just listen and you won’t miss a single key detail, everything is just blurted out with minimal life given to it, most of the dialogue is just pointless exposition with an occasional half-hearted joke thrown in to attempt to give a character a personality but let’s be honest, none of these characters have personalities beyond whatever the actors naturally bring. This isn’t a Hugh Grant in The Gentlemen situation where the character was so clearly well defined from the start that you fell in love with the character, here the only reason to like Sid is if you happen to like Henry Cavill because that’s what you’re getting.

Indeed, In The Grey really needs to be thankful that Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal are as charismatic as they are because they alone are what keeps this film from sinking into cinematic quicksand. They don’t really get any interesting lines but boy do they sell the crap out of whatever they have. They manage to make bland expositional banter sound like it was actually well written, that’s a skill that not a lot of actors have. They also have ridiculous chemistry as a pair, to the point where you can’t help but wonder if they’re borderline queerbaiting the audience since they literally call each other ‘husbands’ at some points and throw out playful flirty dialogue with such ease that it feels like the film held back on letting them actually be a couple in the film… which is shame because then there might be something interesting about this movie.

In general everything just feels like it’s on autopilot, a xerox copy of Guy Ritchie’s more interesting movies except this one has the nerve and audacity to actually be directed by Guy Ritchie. I’ve seen this man make this exact film before, he’s managed to make them interesting and enjoyable with enough entertaining elements to make them worth recommending to people or watching again. This film is so limp and lifeless that it honestly can make you wonder if Guy Ritchie has ever made a good film or if he’s just been lucky to have put enough charismatic actors in lead parts that could make his scripts work. It’s like the Temu Guy Ritchie except, again, it’s actually from Guy Ritchie and it feels wrong for him to just make a basic version of one of his own films. It’s not even that it’s bad, the final act is entertaining and the two leading men are pretty fun but god damn… it’d be bad criticism to say “It feels like this film is what you’d get out of ChatGPT if you asked it to make a Guy Ritchie film” but that’s more or less what I’m saying here.

In The Grey had the chance to be something interesting but interesting requires effort and I don’t think anyone involved wanted to put in the effort. It’s a bunch of exposition, some gun fights and one really cool explosion all wrapped around a story of an uninteresting billionaire who owes money to a big ass company who use non-legal means to get it back… that should be cool as hell, instead it’s about as interesting as slightly overcooked toast. If Guy Ritchie could remember how to make an interesting character, that’d be great.