For about an hour, I was tracking with In the Grey as a slightly trashier, but not that much trashier, Steven Soderbergh-esque buddy procedural about two fixers helping a cutthroat lawyer recover a massive sum of money for her clients. Guy Ritchie‘s had a busy 2020s, not entirely unlike Soderbergh, and both directors work quickly enough that it’s easy for some of their movies to get lost as minor entries in otherwise very consistent filmographies. Soderbergh has always jumped between different modes and tones, from high-level espionage thrillers like Black Bag to meditative art cons like The Christophers. Ritchie generally keeps things closer to the action genre he’s spent decades doing quite well. For that first hour, though, In the Grey steals from the shooting and editing language of Soderbergh for a movie I was enjoying quite a bit.
Light on its feet and never especially perilous for its central duo, In the Grey is a straightforward star vehicle for Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal as the wonderfully named Sid and Bronco. They’re two guys who seem like they’ve seen just about everything and have an answer for every possible problem. A sort of Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega pairing, except with access to explosives, weapons and an entire network of cronies capable of taking down an island full of corrupt cops and citizens bought and paid for by Manny Salazar, the target of Rachel’s (Eiza González) latest job.
The reason the first half reminded me so much of a Soderbergh movie is the construction of the operation itself. The film spends its opening stretch laying out the details of the job and how Sid, Bronco and Rachel plan to execute it, using montages and narration from the trio to piece together the various moving parts before the actual mission begins. It’s procedural in a way that I found surprisingly engaging, letting the characters’ confidence and chemistry do most of the heavy lifting.
Gyllenhaal ultimately gets the most to do and stands out the most among the crowded cast, which also includes Rosamund Pike as Bobby, an executive at the asset management firm employing Rachel, and Carlos Bardem as Salazar himself. Gyllenhaal has always had a knack for elevating gummy action material by playing directly into it with every fiber of his being. He did it with Ambulance, which I think is a trashy action masterpiece, and he did it with The Covenant, which I thought was pretty good. He’s a little more on cruise control here than he was in either of those, but he’s still holding his own, and his charisma pairs nicely with both Cavill and González.
Then the movie turns into a much more generic shootout during the final third, and that’s where it starts losing me. The action itself isn’t bad, but Ritchie doesn’t really bring many new ideas to it, and because of how casually the first hour establishes the central trio as almost impossibly competent, you never really feel like they’re in that much danger. Once they successfully siphon Salazar’s assets, the movie essentially has to manufacture another reason to keep going, with Salazar taking Rachel captive and forcing Sid and Bronco back into action to save her life and take him down for good.
It reminded me a little bit of the structure of The Covenant, where Dar Salim’s character saves Gyllenhaal before Gyllenhaal spends the rest of the movie trying to return the favor. But The Covenant essentially cuts itself in half around that shift and finds something formally interesting in doing so. Here, the final act feels more tacked on, almost as if Ritchie had a really good idea for an hour of a movie and then needed to figure out how to stretch it into something longer.
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Still, it’s not a bad movie. With properly calibrated expectations, I think audiences could have a decent amount of fun with it. It didn’t find much success theatrically, but I can absolutely see In the Grey becoming the kind of action movie that finds a second or third life once it lands on streaming and people start stumbling into it on a random weeknight.
Ritchie’s made better movies this decade, but this is the sort of trashier action movie I tend to prefer over the increasingly interchangeable output from Jason Statham or the assembly-line action pictures streaming services have been churning out for years. For an hour, I was genuinely into its slick little fixer procedural. Unfortunately, In the Grey eventually gets stuck there.
Score: 5/10
In the Grey (2026)
- Cast: Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal, Eiza González, Carlos Bardem, Michael Vu, Fisher Stevens, Rosamund Pike
- Director: Guy Ritchie
- Genre: Action, Thriller
- Runtime: 97 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: May 15, 2026
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