“The Gray Man” hit select theaters last weekend, but it’s on Netflix now, so anyone not already preoccupied with Comic-Con or the concurrent release of Jordan Peele’s “Nope” can kick back and watch it in the comfort of their own home. Those who do might be in store for a few big, crazy action sequences — something you wouldn’t necessarily associate with Gosling. He’s appeared in low-to-mid-budget actioners like “Drive” and “The Nice Guys,” but hitching himself to the Russo brothers train for “The Gray Man” meant getting on top of an actual train. The actor told MTV News:
“There’s a [‘Gray Man’] sequence in Prague that is, you know, pretty epic. And it ends with me, running on top of these train cars as they’re falling away, as I jump from car to car. And it did sort of sum up the experience of the movie. It did feel like ‘this is exactly what this movie is, has felt like.’ It’s just, you know, barely making it from sequence to sequence. Just barely making it out of this thing alive. And they saved it ’til the end of production. It’s the last thing we shot. And it did make me think, do they think this might be the last thing I ever shoot? Is that why this is tucked into the end?”
Surviving The Gray Man
Netflix
Adapted from a novel by Mark Greaney, “The Gray Man” also reunites Evans and the Russos with screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who penned “Infinity War” and “Endgame” and all three “Captain America” films. They had a hand in the script for “Thor: The Dark World,” too, but we don’t talk about that.
Like “The Dark World,” “The Gray Man” has earned mixed reviews, with our own Hoai-Tran Bui calling it “an aggressively mediocre action flick.” However, in Douglas Laman’s breakdown of the film’s best and worst moments, he singled out the epic Prague chase that Gosling describes as its best action sequence. It’s a scene that involves cars (and Ana de Armas!), not only a train, and it serves as the centerpiece for a film where Gosling’s character is on the run with the CIA’s secrets and a target on his back.
Sierra Six’s reputation as a mercenary precedes him and as he survives one death-defying ordeal after another, he talks about coming away with a bruised ego. If nothing else, it’s good to know that Gosling also survived the whole action filmmaking ordeal long enough to do press for “The Gray Man.” The official synopsis for the film is as follows:
THE GRAY MAN is CIA operative Court Gentry (Ryan Gosling), aka, Sierra Six. Plucked from a federal penitentiary and recruited by his handler, Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton), Gentry was once a highly-skilled, Agency-sanctioned merchant of death. But now the tables have turned and Six is the target, hunted across the globe by Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans), a former cohort at the CIA, who will stop at nothing to take him out. Agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas) has his back. He’ll need it.
