Guy Ritchie is a filmmaker and series creator who keeps himself busy, both in terms of his workload and his approach to storytelling. It would be foolish to expect anything from Ritchie’s rare subset of heist movies, from early films like Snatch from a generation ago to his latest, In the Grey. These movies don’t really show the inner lives of what used to be known as “characters.” It’s all about the surface, the outside. “In the Grey” satisfies your tolerance as a viewer and keeps you focused on the thread and your watch.
All of the actors and models this time are Ritchie alumni. Jake Gyllenhaal has starred in the 2023 Afghanistan War epic drama The Convenant. Henry Cavill headlined Ritchie’s The Man from UNCLE (2015) and the World War II action film The Ministries of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024). Eiza Gonzalez co-starred in the latter and in Ritchie’s fantasy quest The Fountain of Youth (2025).
“In the Gray” combines Ritchie’s penchant for inhuman levels of grace under pressure. Honor and loyalty to your supporting comrades, even if the audience doesn’t know their names. Explanation dumps are mainly delivered through narration. The first voice-over assignment is Rachel Wilde (Gonzalez), an ace debt collector and legal genius who is hired by a ruthless Manhattan money manager (Rosamund Pike, substituting “eel” for “branch”) to deploy a private army on the private island of an underworld kingpin (Carlos Bardem) in order to recoup the $1 billion he owes her.
It’s easy! “In the Grey” presents a carefully visualized plan for Rachel and her trusted mercenary duo, extraction and surveillance professionals Sidney (Cabille) and Bronco (Gyllenhaal), on their way to recovering the gold. They do their best to anticipate the kind of trouble Rachel will run into as she negotiates with the Kingpin and his lawyer (Fisher Stevens, waiting in vain for better material). Ritchie takes it relatively easy on the joy of killing, at least until the climax, and there are a few fascinating minutes along the way thanks to some of the simplest, cleanest action filmmaking this film has to offer. It’s a chase involving a motorcycle, a police car, and expert editing.
Ritchie and his crew shot much of In the Gray in Tenerife, Spain, the largest of the Canary Islands, and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where film production rebates recently reached an ultra-competitive 60 percent. This was not the case with Ritchie’s project. In the Gray was filmed in 2023, and after some fiddling, Ritchie did some reshoots and reediting, apparently cutting the film down to an acceptably confusing 90 minutes or so (excluding credits).
For half-laughing clarity, many of the step-by-step details of the mission are displayed on screen, with small notes scrawled just above the action. (Or stagnation.) Elsewhere, Ritchie endlessly rehearses the general stages of an extraction plan in montages, breaking them down on screen and summarizing them in large font lists like an AI synopsis. Well, that’s one way. It’s also a risky method, similar to screenwriter embarrassment, made worse in real time by a de facto apology for not being able to make things clearer or more interesting 20 minutes earlier.
“In the Grey,” full of dialogue about the global domination of wealth management, makes the more pernicious mistake of making everything too easy for its own deep-seated interests. The best clinically-laid plans are bound to fail on the final lap. But by then, clothes and watches aside, the less human nature of Smoothie on screen had undermined the film’s modest star-driven mission.
