Guy Ritchie’s ‘In The Grey’ is all plan and no personality

There’s a scene in Quentin Tarantino’s ’90’s blaxploitation film Jackie Brown that perfectly sums up how I felt after watching In The Grey. After a crime scheme gone wrong, Samuel L Jackson’s Ordell Robbie shoots Robert de Niro’s Louis Gara in the stomach and then looks at him with a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. “What the f*** happened to you, man?” he asks. “Your ass used to be beautiful.” I would want to say the same to Guy Ritchie after seeing his latest effort as writer-director. After all, this is the same filmmaker who gave us Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch and The Gentlemen — three of the coolest crime movies made. Films overflowing with personality, memorable characters and the kind of dialogue that made you want to spend time in the worlds Ritchie created, regardless of what the plot was about. In The Grey has none of that. Instead, it feels like the sort of anonymous streaming-era action thriller that would quietly appear on Netflix one Friday afternoon and be forgotten by Monday morning. The story centres on Rachel Wild (Eiza González), a high-powered debt recovery lawyer whose specialty is forcing billionaires to pay what they owe. When ruthless tycoon Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem) refuses to settle a $1 billion debt and murders the man sent to collect it, Rachel takes over the case. To bring him to heel, she deploys two trusted operatives,Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Sid (Henry Cavill), who wage a campaign of sabotage, espionage and intimidation against Salazar’s sprawling empire. What begins as an aggressive debt collection exercise eventually escalates into kidnappings, shoot-outs, double-crosses and a small private war on a Mediterranean island. That’s the basic setup. The problem is that the film spends so much time explaining plans, contingencies and strategy that it forgets to give us much reason to care about the people involved. Rachel is clearly intended to be the central character. We are repeatedly told how