‘In the Grey’ Review: Guy Ritchie’s Breezy, Island-Set Actioner Chases Its Own Tail

The Guy Ritchie content conveyor belt continues to turn with In the Grey, another largely disposable actioner that starts off as a breezy romp and ends up an overly dense spider’s web of almost arbitrary plot choices punctuated by automatic weapons fire. The comedically dense plot isn’t a problem until Ritchie, who wrote the script, tries to tie it all together into something that makes a bit of sense. He comes close but doesn’t quite deliver, having tossed too many balls in the air to have a remote chance of catching all of them.

In the Grey exudes a jaunty spirit that cuts against the dour grain of many of today’s modern action films. Ritchie is much more interested in deftly executed capers than grotesque close-ups of the damage done to people’s bodies or cynical examinations of the thin line between crime and the legal system. Although Rachel (Eiza González) describes herself in one of her many lengthy narrations as a lawyer who operates “between the moral and the immoral,” In the Grey actually has a clearly demarcated sense of right and wrong.

There are villains here in the traditional sense, like the ultra-wealthy crime boss Manny (Carlos Bardem) who Rachel is squeezing for a billion dollars he stole from an equally shady asset manager, Bobby Sheen (Rosamund Pike). Then there are the good guys, like mercenaries and close mates Sid (Henry Cavill) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal), technically criminals due to helping Rachel abuse the law as well as Manny, but clearly identified as white hats given their bright dispositions and lack of sadism.

And why wouldn’t the two be cheerful? Ritchie’s scenario has them banging around a sun-splashed island (in reality Tenerife, with some Jeddah locations) like tourists on some extreme vacation package. While Rachel turns up the “forensic sabotage” on Manny, using hackers and legal maneuvers to shut down his shell companies and seize his assets, Sid, Bronco, and a squad of other barely sketched hired guns have a grand old time rehearsing scenarios for rescuing her from Manny’s clutches should her negotiations with him turn south.

In practice, this means Rachel’s “boys” (though Gonzalez is younger than Cavill and Gyllenhaal, Ritchie presents her as a kind of surrogate mother for their characters, who she rescued from prison and now act as doting protectors, even calling her “mum”) spend their time engaging in something like a more militaristic Top Gear. The target shooting, ATV and dirt bike racing, and trap- and explosive-setting for potential pursuers all constitutes a lads’ adventure take on Chekov’s gun principle and precursor to the climactic chase scene.

These preparation sequences should be deadly dull. But Ritchie pulls them off, largely due to Cavill and Gyllenhaal’s easygoing chemistry, which makes In the Grey zip along more smoothly than the filmmaker’s equally chatty, desert island-set The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. It also helps that Ritchie’s action sensibility eschews chest-thumping machismo in favor of quiet professionalism and sarcastic quipping.

The film presents an extreme version of Ritchie’s love for having characters deliver paragraphs of exposition about their plans. The complexities of Rachel and the boys’ operation are so dense that Ritchie resorts to explanatory on-screen labels pointing to this character or that bit of gear, just in case viewers needed to know the make and model of anti-aircraft rocket launcher.

That’s an approach that works until it doesn’t. By the time In the Grey starts wrapping up—though blissfully short, it contains some confusing gaps that suggest either too-fast writing or poorly executed late edits—so much has been rehearsed and explained that the conclusion is a letdown, even with its plentiful chases, explosions, and sprays of bullets. At some point before the truncated-seeming finale, the film is just chasing its own tail.