Filmaniacs: Spy thriller ‘The Gray Man’ spices up the summer | Entertainment

CIA Deputy Director Carmichael (René-Jean Page, “Bridgerton”) sends in a privatized asset named Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans) to recover Six’s intel and dispose of the man by any means possible.

The performances sell the story more than anything. Gosling plays Six with a modicum of restraint. He’s a man of few words who employs his father’s harsh macho survivalist training to his benefit.

Ana de Armas (“Knives Out”) has good chemistry with Gosling on screen as the CIA agent allied with him; their work together on “Blade Runner 2049” works in their favor.

The actor stealing the show is Evans. He’s sadistic and enjoys his work as an asset recovery specialist. For an actor spending a good portion of his career playing heroic protagonists, it’s enjoyable to watch him have fun playing a sociopath.

The action set pieces — a staple for such movies — are well paced and intense. An public firefight in Prague is one of the more entertaining sequences. There is clearly a sense of the setting’s geography and where all the players are located.

And while there are many likable elements in the film, it’s not a perfect movie. The writing on the story is cliché and the subtitles indicating different international locations are unnecessary; they are large and a good establishing shot of a local landmark would better tell the audience where things take place.

Carmichael’s villainous motivations are inconsistent. The operation at the beginning of the movie was meant to be discrete even if he was OK with some collateral damage. By the time the aforementioned Vienna scene pops up, he doesn’t care how public Hansen’s manhunt gets or how many civilians get caught in the crossfire.

During a period where Netflix has been hemorrhaging subscribers and firing animation studios, this is one of the better projects put out by the streaming service.

Recent comments about patrons going to movie theaters by co-director Joe Russo have come to be a bit controversial. He describes the experience as “elitist” because of how expensive it is to go to the theater.

To be fair, it is expensive but part of that has to do with industry projections. While it is a money-making venture, more and more income from ticket sales go back to the studios while the theaters themselves (and their employees) subsist on the funds raised by the overpriced concessions. That’s nothing new.

But with the pandemic more or less over, there’s been a push in the industry to bring patrons back to the theater. Most of these ads have been produced by the franchises themselves, but without the patronage, these businesses and their employees would be out of business.

Ironically it’s this same industry that partners with these businesses that works hard to get the movies out as fast as possible even into streaming while still requiring theaters to produce as much of their financial offsets as possible.

While the hybrid model seems to work and provides less expensive options for moviegoers, audiences still want to go to the movies because it’s not only fun to have a break from reality, it’s also beneficial to get out of the house after more than a year of lockdowns.