Yesterday, the trailer for The Gray Man came out, giving us our first look at the new Netflix action movie starring Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling and a bunch of other hot people, and directed by the Russo Brothers, and…I don’t know. I just don’t know. It looks sort of generic? It actually reminds me of the trailer for 6 Underground, the Michael Bay Netflix action movie starring Ryan Reynolds and a bunch of hot people. I have to tell you, when I hit “play” on The Gray Man trailer, I didn’t expect my first thought to be “6 Underground”. I don’t think I ever expected to think about 6 Underground again. It’s probably not a good thing that I’m thinking of it now, but I have a lot of the same questions about this trailer as I did that one. Who? Why? Bad guy after good guy? Bad guy after badder guy? Badder guy after bad guy? This trailer is taking for granted we know more about this movie than we do, especially casual viewers who don’t read every scrap of information on the internet.
Maybe this is just a bad trailer. Boy, I hope it’s just a bad trailer. Because I am unmoved by this. There’s a little bit of life in the way Gosling says, “I mean, my ego’s a little bruised.” There’s shades of The Nice Guys in that, just a little reminder that Gosling can be very funny. But that “trash stache” line? I am indifferent. I think I was expecting a little more sizzle between Evans and Gosling and their chemistry is a bit, um, flat? I’m not bowled over. Like, I should be raring to see an entire movie of cat-and-mouse games between these two, and I’m just…not. Maybe there will be another trailer ahead of the film’s July 22 release that will do a better job of selling me on this movie, although I feel like “action movie with Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans” shouldn’t be a hard sell, but this trailer has now made it a hard sell. Something tells me The Gray Man isn’t going to be the silver bullet that fixes Netflix’s “disposable movies” problem.
