Over the past decade, something has changed in Guy Ritchie’s filmmaking. Film after film, his work has become that of a director increasingly focused on the act of execution. He is, at times, exceptionally refined in his craft, as is the case with “In the Grey,” which hits theaters on May 15.
The turning point can be traced back to “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” which arrived in 2015, four years after “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.” The latter marked the end of a phase for Ritchie characterized by gritty, intense stories and equally compelling characters. Of course, there have been a few exceptions in the meantime: “The Gentlemen” (the film) returned to that atmosphere.
But the most immediate answer—and perhaps, in part, the most accurate one—lies in recognizing how Ritchie has essentially become a mainstream director, how he has tailored himself to Hollywood. A wonderland where a gifted filmmaker like him—who understands the importance of dynamics, kinetics, and camera movement—has found the approval and tools to create all the action and adventure he wanted, without too many frills or pretensions.
What is ‘In the Grey’?
In the Grey fits, neither more nor less, exactly into this category. The plot is extremely thin, with Ritchie having written practically all his own screenplays over the past decade: it tells the story of a private debt collector (Eiza González) who collects debts of titanic proportions using a mix of legal and illegal means—this is the “gray area” referred to in the title; if you will, his fascination with antiheroes is the common thread that has remained unchanged over the decades. To succeed, she enlists the help of two grown men—big, tough, and, when necessary, ruthless (Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal)—who get their hands dirty and use gunpowder when “Mama” gets into trouble.
It doesn’t go much further than that; there’s no need to look for any deep nuances. Ritchie doesn’t seem to care as much about that as he does about the mechanism—the click of one scene leading to the next. To be a bit more romantic and look a little deeper into his prolific filmography—he’s never worked this hard; since 2019, he’s been churning out practically two films a year—we shouldn’t dismiss the whole thing with excessive superficiality.
Because the British director seems to have latched onto an idea of action cinema that is, in its own way, rigorous, stylized, and reduced to movement—to a sense of mechanical progression rather than narrative one. In short, we return to the principle of execution, of a game that loves rules and also makes them available to the viewer—the structure is that of a heist film without a heist: form the team, make a plan, put it into practice.
Well-oiled entertainment machines
In short, a cinematic system within which he operates with his own subsystem. Traces of Ritchie’s intentions—which serve an industrial principle while remaining at the service of his precise direction—are everywhere. For example, in his habit of always bringing along the same cast of actors, whom he mixes and recombines like the components of a formula to be optimized for cinematic action. If it used to be Jason Statham, now it’s Cavill (he’s made three films with him), Jake Gyllenhaal (two), and Eiza González (another two).
Now, the flip side of his approach to cinema is that he has progressively abandoned the immediate iconic quality that distinguished his pre-2015 works; do you remember Brad Pitt’s gypsy in Snatch? The plot stripped down to the essentials and the characters’ profiles reduced to the bare minimum make them perfect puppets (precisely, the components), but unsuited to evoking emotional resonance. That is no longer their function.
Films like In the Grey are finely oiled, functional clockwork devices. By their very nature, they no longer possess the frills or embellishments, crests, and insignia that would make them resilient to the test of time beyond the span allotted for them to tick and explode—a span of time they always repay.
We won’t be talking about In the Grey ten years from now; we probably won’t consider it a case study or a film of significant impact. We will, however, speak of it indirectly when we discuss this phase (can we call it a phase? Will we still call it a phase? We’ll see) of Ritchie’s career, increasingly defined and sculpted into a very precise conception of entertainment, stripped down to the bone, in which the parts respond religiously to the whole. Yes, this too is auteur cinema, but without saying so out loud.
