In the Grey (2026)

Guy Ritchie's latest is as slick as you'd expect, but it's frenetic to the point of irritation.

It feels like a long time since Guy Ritchie made a film that was excellent. One could perhaps argue that he’s never reached such a peak. But it’s undeniable that films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) or Snatch (2000) were highly effective, or that his two Sherlock Holmes (2009, 2011) offerings weren’t a real surprise. These films remain his best work, and he’s also plummeted the depths of some of the worst work of the 21st century with utter stinkers like Swept Away (2002) and Revolver (2005).

Indeed, after the horrors of Revolver- which came straight on the back of the abysmal Swept Away- he went back to the geezer/gangster work he knew best, pumping out the rather inert yet inoffensive RocknRolla (2008), before reinventing himself entirely with the terrific Sherlock Holmes outings. More recently he’s dipped his toes into war, with the well-meaning but ultimately disappointing The Covenant (2023). His most loved film of recent years is probably 2020’s The Gentlemen (2020), perhaps because it harks back to his early work and was, at the very least, the safest thing he’d produced for a while. The success of the film has led to a Ritchie produced T.V series of the same name, which I’ve not seen.

In the Grey arrives swiftly to streaming, bypassing UK cinemas entirely. It tells the frenetic story of Eliza Gonzalez’s Rachel Wild, a lawyer who specialises in recovering money from extremely wealthy and dangerous clients. She’s hired to recover $1 billion owed by crime lord Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem) to the financial firm she represents. After a previous debt collector is killed by Salazar, Rachel brings in Sid (Henry Cavill) and Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) who prepare a covert team of elite operatives for an extraction of Rachel from Salazar’s heavily fortified private island, after the inevitable meeting between the two towards the end of the film.

Ritchie’s films have never been subtle, and In the Grey doesn’t buck that trend. The first forty minutes or so consist of Rachel’s voiceover quite literally telling you what’s happening as it happens, then telling you what’s going to happen later on. Gyllenhaal does exactly the same when he’s explaining the different potential extraction points for the climax, right down to Ritchie showing us flashforwards to it unfurling. Sure, there are many films that do this kind of thing successfully; just look at Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001), a film that does it in an extremely flashy yet effective way. We know Ritchie is a flashy film maker, but effective is a word that frequently evades descriptions of his films.

In the Grey is slick, in ways that admittedly only a Ritchie vehicle could perhaps be, but the opening half is frantic to the point of irritation. There’s no reason to care about any of the characters whatsoever. Expecting depth from a Ritchie film is foolish, but this races along at such a speed that you’re left scratching your head; not because you can’t keep up with what’s unfurling, rather that you simply don’t care. At the halfway point, you can feel yourself getting very restless.

Thankfully, the last third of In the Grey is hugely entertaining. Inevitably, it turns out that all of the potential extraction points that were explained to us earlier are needed, and the non-stop action that takes us through the final straight of the film delivers a longer and more fleshed out version of the various snippets of footage we saw earlier. But despite the fact that you know exactly what’s going to happen, almost to the minute, In the Grey ends on a real high. The final third is relentlessly entertaining, and makes you wonder why it is that Ritchie can’t seem to pull this off for ninety straight minutes. Gyllenhaal’s Bronco is front and centre for this, and he's probably the one character that you have any interest in, because his performance is one of the reasons to watch In the Grey. The other is Rosamund Pike as an executive, whose screen time is pathetic; yet she has an absolute blast with her handful of lines. As the woman who the whole film is built around, Gonzalez does her best but her character is underserved. She’s built up as a sharp-minded successful business woman who has Salazer by the balls from minute one, yet the script gives us contradictory material in attempting to persuade us that a woman of such stature hasn’t bargained for Salazar’s subsequent actions once she’s got what she wanted.

Guy Ritchie’s career now seems to consist of carving out glorified B-movies that are heading straight to our streaming services, because they’re the ones that will back him. But in actual fact, most of his major releases have simply passed me by, and perhaps this assumption was simply one that came to me during In the Grey. That’s what it feels like now; Ritchie was once a director who had the ability to surprise, even if it wasn’t very often. Now it feels like he’s found a comfortable niche where he can thrash out films like In the Grey almost at will. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does mean that by the time you feel like you’re finally enjoying yourself, the film’s almost passed you by. ★★½ 6.0/10