The Russo Brothers, most famous for leaving their mark on the MCU with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, have retired from the superhero game, and are now making their own original action films. I don’t know if Kevin Feige was pulling the strings all along, or if they’re just not really trying anymore, but this movie is a testament to the fact that it doesn’t really seem like they can stand on their own as filmmakers.
SYNOPSIS: When the CIA’s most skilled mercenary known as Court Gentry, aka Sierra Six, accidentally uncovers dark agency secrets, he becomes a primary target and is hunted around the world by psychopathic former colleague Lloyd Hansen and international assassins.
A movie with Chris Evans, Ryan Gosling, and Ana de Armas should not be this painfully average. The saying of ‘This movie has so-and-so actors in it, it shouldn’t have been bad’ truly shows that the quality of a movie really starts and ends with the filmmakers themselves. If you don’t have strong filmmaking, whatever or whoever is in front of the camera - no matter what they’re doing - will have zero impact. That’s not to say that I think this is any of these threes’ best work, because it’s certainly not, but just because big names are attached does not directly correlate with quality.
Ryan Gosling has enough charisma to float his cookie-cutter character to slightly elevated heights, but he’s caught between being charming, and having to carry the weight of the “dark and brooding male-action hero” archetype. He seems to be having fun somewhat, and I think he’s doing some of his own stunt work, which definitely elevates the action ever-so-slightly. Ana de Armas is given literally nothing to do in this movie, and her character is reduced to a role reversal of the damsel in distress and a distasteful sexual harassment joke. Again though, she seems to be doing some of her own stunts in the action scenes, which I love to see.
Chris Evans is good, but his character’s dialogue is trying to hit the mark of cheesy 90s action villains, and it misses quite a bit. He’s menacing enough to come off as a threat, but some of his lines are pretty hammy; however, Chris Evans is questionably good at playing a jackass, so it works for the most part here. His character’s motivations are lacking, and they try to make his eventually meeting with Gosling as this big showdown, but you’re just not emotionally invested enough to care too much.
As far as the action goes, because that’s really what the majority of this movie is, it’s not god awful, but it’s not great by any means. For some reason in most of the scenes, there’s always a heavy mask of smoke that covers up whatever is happening on screen, making it hard to see what’s actually going on. This, coupled with some pretty choppy editing, makes the action scenes feel very sloppy and incoherent, which is a shame because of how dense some of the setpieces can be.
In all of the action scenes, the camerawork is almost strange. There’s a lot of really oddly placed drone shots that add absolutely nothing to the action, and are almost always distracting. The frequency of these shots was abundant, and it makes the movie look really cheap despite it being a - wait. This is a 200 million dollar movie!? With that kind of budget, this movie does not use it to it’s advantage whatsoever, and could’ve done just fine floating under 100 million.
It’s strange to watch a movie where you can literally tell that the filmmakers were putting more effort into some scenes more than others, because the film’s two biggest action scenes are actually pretty decent and entertaining. The camera widens out a little bit, and the smoke clears, letting us see the spectacle that is some of these action scenes. If there’s one thing this movie is, it’s big. The scale of the final action scene is very apparent, and the scenes are long enough and paced well enough to be engaging and to not feel allusive.
Where this movie fails is the script. The story at times feels like it’s getting made up as it goes along, throwing in new character dynamics to advance the plot convenience all the way until the very end. There’s an interesting character arc for Gosling that starts, but never finishes. The end of the movie is tacked on, and nearly feels like a reshoot compared to the rest of the movie because of how abrupt it is. The one thing I can praise this movie for, is that it didn’t add an unnecessary romantic throughline in anyway. So many action movies get bogged down by that, and this movie was void of it, thank God.
I’m afraid the stigma of all of these big budget marvel movies coming out with big stars attached is affecting what filmmakers think they can get away with in terms of action movies. This movie is sloppy, and has no attention to its flat and underutilized characters. The story is weak, and while the action is certainly entertaining, it all feels hollow. If you want a great action movie, go watch Top Gun: Maverick or Everything Everywhere All at Once, just avoid this one unless you really are in the mood for some mindless entertainment.
5/10
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