“In the gray zone”: superficial thriller with Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal

“In the gray area” (“In the Grey”) is a film Guy Ritchie which constitutes, to a certain extent, an exercise in stylistic repetition that already manifests the creative limits of the British director in action cinema.

As it progresses, I immediately realize that, in addition, it is a conventional and predictable action thriller, which wanders too much between strategic plans with the operatives played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill in a carefree manner.

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The plot follows Sid and Bronco, two elite agents who are hired by lawyer Rachel Wild to recover a billion dollars stolen by a corrupt businessman named Manny Salazar, while preparing an extraction operation on the billionaire’s island as an escape measure in case the debt negotiation fails.

In general, this premise structures the story from the formulas of action cinema and international adventure thriller, where secret agents carry out the mission using their special abilities to start a campaign of sabotage, bribery and deception before facing the enemies with gun in hand.

However, the script does not take the slightest trouble to develop the characters and often chooses to reduce their actions to a series of explanatory situations that never evade the expository demands of the dialogues, where basically more is said than necessary to justify the conflict.

This, by definition, invites me to remain in a state of apathy when watching Bronco and Sid’s secret operations to easily destabilize the businesses of the megalomaniacal villain Salazar; Sid and Bronco’s strategies with their team when they acquire an arsenal of weapons and vehicles to prepare the different contingency plans to evacuate Rachel; the capture of Rachel following the legal victory over the seizure of Salazar’s assets; Sid and Bronco’s new mission to rescue Rachel by improvising on alternative escape routes.

There are conversations about lies, clientelism, finance, corporate corruption. But the hubbub of the recovery plan turns into an escalation of gratuitous violence and dull conversations that only lead to predictable action sequences.

Plot twists are announced in advance, and supposed “witty moments” fall into redundancy.

Furthermore, the issue is hampered by a lack of rhythm that is evident throughout that 98-minute duration that aims to be agile, but whose instance in explaining each step of the plan generates the opposite effect: intermittent slowness followed by hasty resolutions in which the agents solve the problem without many difficulties when they eliminate the enemies.

Aside from this, Cavill and Gyllenhaal demonstrate a certain physical expertise for the action scenes, in addition to showing a certain synergy as the duo of charismatic stuntmen who, in their male camaraderie, speak in a sarcastic tone about the logistics of the mission; although their characters—Sid and Bronco—remain empty archetypes: generic versions of those Ritchie antiheroes who exchange playful insults without conveying anything surprising.

Eiza González, for her part, suffers the worst treatment: her character is an “empowered woman” who utters statements without the script granting her agency outside of the stereotypical trait that leaves her as a feminine accessory.

Technically, Ritchie’s direction places its greatest effectiveness in the elegant costumes, the exotic-sophisticated settings and some modalities of mobile framing to energize the action sequences with practical effects.

There’s some performance to what Ritchie tries to do here, but it’s ultimately insufficient to extract any power from a shallow film that lacks risk before getting lost in explosions, chases, and mechanical shootouts.