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THE GREY MAN MOVIE REVIEW
When the Russo Brothers, the directors of the second and fifth highest grossing movies of all-time, come to you with a new movie they’d like to make, you say, “Yes.” You give them $200 million, and you let them do whatever they want. And sure, it’s not another superhero IP. In fact, it’s not any recognizable IP at all. It’s an adaptation of Mark Greaney’s 2009 debut action spy thriller, The Grey Man. And even better? It’s the first of 12 books. This might very well be the launch point for a brand new franchise ready to throw some ol’ fisticuffs at James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Ethan Hunt. It’s fight scenes, explosions, car chases, bullets flying and body count rising! Ryan Gosling plays Six, a former convict serving life for murder who is recruited by Agent Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) and molded into a highly-skilled assassin for a the deep-cover Sierra program of the CIA. He is the agency’s best merchant of death. However, a mission goes badly and now Six is on the run from the CIA and their clean-up man, sociopathic former agent Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans). Aided by agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), Six must use all his skills and luck to survive. T.C. and Rae accept the mission of reviewing this Netflix original and wonder why any company would spend hundreds of millions of dollars for a movie worthy of the big screen treatment and just stick it on a streaming service people watch on their phones.
DIRECTED BY: Anthony and Joe Russo
STARRING: Ryan Gosling, Cameron Crovetti, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Jessica Henwick, Regé-Jean Page, Dhanush, Wagner Moura, Julia Butters, Alfre Woodard, Billy Bob Thornton, Callan Mulvey, DeObia Oparei, Robert Kazinsky, Shea Whigham, Eme Ikwuakor
YOUR REVIEWERS
T.C. De Witt (Screener Squad)
T.C. De Witt is a multi-awarded writer/director originally from Wisconsin and now based in Los Angeles. His life has been devoted to the arts since he was a child. He’s been a stage performer, playwright, stand-up comic, film and television actor, radio DJ, podcaster published author, recorded musician, and comic writer/illustrator. He is now a professional screenwriter and has been thriving for the past decade, regularly offering his talents to production studios in LA, Chicago, Milwaukee, and internationally in Sydney and Poland. He’s provided content for Amazon Prime, Netflix, and several YouTube partners. His films have screened internationally, and his stageplays have been performed across the country. In the last ten years, he has directed 57 films, 23 episodes of his series The One Minute Rewatch, 300+ episodes of podcasts, and his multi-award-winning short film Screen: Righter screened at the Festival de Cannes in 2016. He has released two feature films, The Princess Knight and A Christmas Sunset. He thrives on collaboration and the thrill of sharing stories in all forms.
Lyrae Anderson (Screener Squad)
You can call me Rae. You can also call me a film lover. I’ll watch it all — small screen; big screen, and everything in between. I have attended and worked for Fantastic Fest and South by Southwest for many years. I married a film geek as well. While we don’t agree on everything, we agree on our love of movies.
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Reviews of The Gray Man are mixed but if you liked the intermittently fast and furious pace of Bill Fairclough’s epic fact based spy novel Beyond Enkription in The Burlington Files series then you will love Anthony Russo’s The Gray Man and vice versa. They both make parts of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series look like slow horses! The Gray Man is about a renegade CIA agent on the run and stars Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans; it’s based on Mark Greaney’s debut novel of the same name. Fairclough’s factual stand-alone thriller Beyond Enkription is about a (real life) MI6 agent on the run from international organised crime gangs and Haiti’s TonTon Macoute from London to Nassau and Port au Prince to Miami. The Gray Man and The Burlington Files are both musts for espionage aficionados. The difference between them is that The Burlington Files series has had mainly five star reviews, it’s full of real characters and was written for espionage cognoscenti some of whom won’t have even heard of the ingenious spycraft tricks featured in this electrifying novel.
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