In The Grey (Guy Ritchie, 2026)⭐

This was an odd duck. Ostensibly a turbo-charged action vehicle, some serious pacing problems make it feel meandering and stodgy when it needs to be nimble and hard-hitting.

Eiza Gonzalez plays Rachel, who is some kind of lawyer. Her specialty, like basically no actual lawyers, is in the recovery of huge amounts of money from the criminals who have taken them from the rich and powerful. Hired by shifty asset management executive, Rosamund Pike, she enlists her team of operatives, led by Sid (Henry Cavill) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhall) to retrieve $1 Billion from Spanish ne'er do well, Manny Salazar.

So, this is essentially a heist movie, with our heroes planning and executing a precision operation on Salazar's private island and against his private army. The problem - or at least the main problem - is... well, you know that bit in any heist flick where we hear our guys talking the crew through the plan, and we see the plan being enacted while they narrate? Guy Ritchie really likes that bit. So much so, at times I began to wonder if I had been watching a planning sequence for most of the film's duration.

The long planning sequences are punctuated by lots of scenes of Rachel on the phone, telling people how things are going to go down and demanding to be paid, plus a couple of token action sequences before the big one where the aforementioned plans go awry.

It's... fine? Goes on a bit. Several plotlines are resolved offscreen, 'in court' which is as anticlimactic as it sounds. Gonzalez is wasted as someone who just makes threats on the phone and looks a bit smug, Cavill and Gyllenhall could be replaced by any 2 random Action Guys and nobody would care or possibly even notice.