In short: The Gray Man (2022)

A CIA killer (Ryan Gosling, whose popularity I’ll never get, because he doesn’t act in any sense of the word beyond acting as some sort of hole in a movie for a viewer to project whatever into and has little charisma I’d see) finds himself first on the run from his own people, and then looking to free the kidnapped sick child of his mentor (Billy Bob Thornton) while fighting off the the private sector incompetents of bad guy Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans, clearly having a blast with the villain role; also at least some recognizable character traits). A pacemaker with GPS is involved, so you can imagine how the rest of the script is.

On the corporate franchise side of movie making, brother duo Anthony and Joe Russo are responsible for some of my favourite Marvel movies – I’d even go so far as to call Captain America: The Winter Soldier one of the best action movies ever made in Hollywood – but their non-superhero action thrillers for Netflix suggest that Marvel’s presumably heavier hand is exactly what they need. Without that sort of guidance, we get movies as bad as Extraction, or as aggressively tedious as this one, a movie that somehow manages to make two hours of action sequences seem long and pretty boring. At least the incessant noise keeps one awake.

It doesn’t help here that none of the action sequences are anything more than big budget competent, lacking in inventiveness, interesting staging and the spark that makes a movie explosion fun, nor that the not-Bourne super spy script all of the action is based on is mostly pretty damn terrible. At least, it has more holes than most victims of Hansen’s or Six’s shoot-outs, does character motivation so badly, it would have been better not to even bother, and wastes a mostly great cast on nothing whatsoever. Because that’s not enough, the movie is also excruciatingly long-winded, and jumps from country to country without ever making any use of the different locations. This could all have happened in a warehouse and not looked or felt any less interesting.

In short: Into the Grizzly Maze

For various not boring reasons, a bunch of idiots and arseholes (played by dependable pros like James Marsden, Thomas Jane, Piper Perabo, Scott Glenn and Billy Bob Thornton) converge on a piece of Alaskan wilderness one character’s dead dad dubbed the Grizzly Maze because “even grizzlies can get lost there”. There’s killer grizzly stuff, brotherly reconciliation, and so many clichés any drinking game would be of actual physical danger.

Which, apart from the cast, all sounds rather second rate SyFy Original, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, while certainly looking much better than your average second rate SyFy Original, David Hackl’s Into the Grizzly Maze is much less entertaining. It might be its nearly offensive stupidity (yes, even in comparison), a script so full of bizarre holes, plain stupid plot devices and clichés its basically inexplicable, or the problem might just be that the film makes a lot of grand gestures supposed to suggest it is a nature strikes back movie on the level of Jaws when it is rather one on the level of Grizzly (without the whole “cheap as dirt” excuse the Girdler film has going for it, mind you).

The actors are completely wasted on characters that are walking, talking clichés, and not the kind of cliché that feels like an archetype but one that feels like lazy writing and disinterest in making any character here interesting instead of obvious. The poor people also have to get through dialogue as bad as it comes. Just try and keep a straight face through even a single sentence Thornton’s Great White Hunter character says, or stop groaning whenever anyone opens his or her mouth.

Even this much crap could still have been made watchable through competent animal attack sequences and decent thriller pacing. Alas, both aren’t in the cards either, for the animal attacks are generally neither clever, nor interesting, nor awesome but are set up with just as little intelligence as the rest of the film demonstrates, while the pacing stops and starts thanks to the film’s insistence on having a lot of characters that are only in the film to talk nonsense and spend way too much time on their uninvolving melodrama (whose ends and consequences are of course obvious right from the start in any case for anyone who has not grown up on some sort of isolated island where TVs and cinemas don’t exist).

Faster (2010)

Freshly released from prison, a man (Dwayne “The Rock Johnson”) – let’s call him Driver – starts killing the people who stole the loot and killed his partners after a successful bank robbery. Driver not actually being a professional criminal, his thirst for vengeance has nothing at all to do with money but with the little fact that one of his murdered partners was his brother, and his murder, as much as the others, absolutely unnecessary. Because Driver’s way of killing people is pretty damn straightforward, the police – in form of a straight professional (Carla Gugino) and drug addicted trouble magnet (Billy Bob Thornton) – are soon on his case. To make things more difficult, there’s also a pretentious hitman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) hired by whoever was actually responsible for the death of Driver’s brother on Driver’s case.

I found George Tillman Jr.’s Faster a somewhat frustrating viewing experience, not because it is a bad movie but because it is indeed a very good movie that suffers from one or two serious missteps that keep it away from being actually brilliant; missteps which seem utterly pointless, too.

First and foremost, there’s the sub-plot about Jackson-Cohen’s killer and his girlfriend (professional daughter and girlfriend) Maggie Grace that seems to have no business being in the movie at all. As characters, the couple seems to come directly out of one of those horrible would-be Tarantino movies (you know, the kind that doesn’t actually get how and why Tarantino's films and characters work, or are too lazy to put the work in). Worse, the hitman and his character arc have little – if any at all – business in a film about vengeance, redemption and forgiveness, seeing as he never does anything redemptive, doesn’t forgive, and isn’t involved in any vengeance. Plus, despite time spent on the killer couple that could have been used more fruitfully on characters that actually have fuck all to do with the rest of the film, the characters stay flat, unbelievable and just painfully uninteresting.

Which is particularly irritating in a film that otherwise shows a particular ability of drawing its minor characters with a strong hand, building on clichés instead of just using them, and easily showing everything you could want to know about a character in a five minute confrontation with Driver. The film’s protagonist is a a vehicle to reveal something about the nature of guilt, and the complexity of it, in others as well as in himself, here.

It does of course help that this is a film that casts actors like Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje or Jennifer Carpenter for these small but extremely important roles, actors willing and able to actually go beyond the cliché and suggest complexities in their characters the film then doesn’t need to explain in excruciating detail and flashbacks.

Speaking of acting, Johnson also shows himself to be perfectly capable of more than just looking angry or tense (though he’s really good at that) but actually gives his characters nuance through body language and looks. While I had already come to the conclusion he’s a better screen presence than most other acting wrestlers, his performance here is convincing enough I can’t help but see him as an actor from here on out, and not a wrestler playing at acting.

Tillman’s direction for its part, while suffering a bit from a case of The Yellow, is tight, focused, and, when it doesn’t waste time on the hitman, decidedly on the intelligent side, giving the shoot-outs and the violence the right amount of excitement but really emphasising characters, and the emotional and moral impact of vengeance.

And while you might think there’s not much new or interesting to say about vengeance, redemption, or the decision to forgive, Faster actually does. Or rather, the film actually places these things in a much better and more complex context than most films concerned with these things do, realizing the deed that drives one character to vengeance will be what turns the life of one or more of the people who had committed that deed around, also realizing that this doesn’t undo anything yet also understanding that undoing horrible things is neither the point of vengeance nor that of forgiveness. And while it’s at it, Faster also does subtle, clever things like insinuating that the guy who ruined your life might just be another poor, weak asshole who can’t seem to make the right decision.

Which is quite a bit of interesting stuff to find in a film that might have turned out to be just another flick about some beefed-up dude taking vengeance on bad guys.

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