In the Grey Review: Gyllenhaal and Cavill Look Great, Feel Empty

Jake Gyllenhaal, Henry Cavill, and Eiza González are three of the most watchable people working in Hollywood right now. Guy Ritchie has built a career on knowing exactly that. And yet In the Grey, his new action thriller now in theaters, has critics asking the same uncomfortable question: what’s the point of all this beauty if there’s nothing underneath it?

The film follows Rachel Wild (González), a high-powered recovery specialist hired by a ruthless Manhattan asset manager — played by a frosty Rosamund Pike — to retrieve $1 billion stolen by a foreign despot named Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem), who is holed up on a private island surrounded by a small army. To get her money back, Rachel deploys her two best operatives: Sid (Cavill) and Bronco (Gyllenhaal), a pair of ex-special forces mercenaries who are, by every available measure, very, very good at their jobs. Almost supernaturally so. And that, it turns out, is exactly the problem.

The Setup Is Actually the Best Part

What’s surprising about In the Grey — and what a few critics have been willing to credit — is that the film’s first two acts, the planning and preparation phase, are genuinely its most engaging. Sid and Bronco don’t just show up and start shooting. They build elaborate extraction routes, plant booby traps, scope out the island’s jail from the inside (Cavill’s character literally gets himself arrested to do recon), and war-game every possible scenario. For a stretch, Ritchie turns his action movie into something closer to a process film, and it’s the most original thing here.

“It’s fun to watch Gyllenhaal and Cavill plan out their elaborate mission in meticulous detail,” Collider noted, before adding that the film “eventually evolves into a generic actioner that frustratingly forgets that watching action movies is supposed to be a fun endeavor.”

Ritchie leans hard on onscreen graphics to walk audiences through the plan — checklists, labels, large-font step-by-step breakdowns, even the ingredients of a Negroni that pop up like a hipster cocktail menu while González delivers exposition. It’s a stylistic choice that reads, depending on your patience, as either a fun directorial flourish or a confession that the screenplay needed help. Variety landed somewhere in the middle, calling it “one way to go” while noting it risks “coming off like screenwriter perplexity, compounded in real time by de facto apologies for not having made things clearer or more interesting 20 minutes ago.”

The Hollywood Reporter clocked a sharper comparison: the backgammon con Cavill’s character pulls on a corrupt accountant is essentially the gin rummy scene from Goldfinger, and the film’s DNA more broadly traces back to the muscle-bound ’80s action movies of Stallone and Schwarzenegger — except those films had the good sense to let their heroes bleed occasionally.

Beautiful People, Empty Vessels

The core critique across nearly every review is the same: Gyllenhaal and Cavill are given almost nothing to work with as human beings. “Stiff as boards,” Collider wrote. “Essentially sharing a personality.” The Wrap was more blunt, calling In the Grey “a one way ticket to Dullsville. Population: this poor, poor cast.”

There are flickers of something more. The two leads exchange deadpan quips — one casually telling the other “I love you,” or referring to his partner as his “husband” — that hint at either genuine feeling or ironic detachment. Nobody seems entirely sure which, and the film never commits. “These two hunky, unstoppable badasses have real feelings for each other? That would add chemistry and depth,” The Wrap observed. “These two hunky, unstoppable badasses say quippy, meaningless things? That doesn’t even count as a character trait.”

Gyllenhaal, at least, occasionally flashes something unhinged around the edges. But the movie keeps pulling him back. Cavill is handsome and capable and almost completely inert.

González fares better, and most critics are willing to say so. MovieWeb called her the standout, praising “a commanding performance that’s fierce and feminine” — though even that review acknowledged Ritchie undercuts her with relentless voiceover that substitutes narration for actual character development. Collider floated a genuinely intriguing hypothetical: what if González and Pike had swapped roles? It’s the kind of recast that makes you realize the film is leaving something on the table.

The supporting cast is largely wasted. Fisher Stevens sweats and mops his brow as Salazar’s attorney. Kristofer Hivju — beloved as Tormund Giantsbane on Game of Thrones — shows up as the chief henchman with an aggressively menacing beard, briefly seems like he might be allowed to do something, and then fades into the background like everyone else.

Ritchie’s Craft Is Still There — Mostly

Whatever else you want to say about In the Grey, it doesn’t look cheap. Most of the film was shot on Tenerife, the largest of Spain’s Canary Islands, and in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia — locations that give Ritchie and his cinematographer genuinely beautiful material to work with. The overhead drone shots, the motorcycle chases, the sprawling gunfights through sun-drenched streets — it’s all efficiently staged by a director who has forgotten more about action choreography than most filmmakers will ever learn.

MovieWeb gave Ritchie real credit here: “His kinetic camera work and action choreography haven’t lost a step. The film has tremendous chase scenes through multiple settings.” Even Variety, in its skeptical review, singled out a motorcycle-and-police-car chase as “the simplest, cleanest action filmmaking the film has to offer.”

But efficiency isn’t excitement. When Sid and Bronco mow through Salazar’s army without taking so much as a scratch — weapons that never need reloading, earpieces that never cut out, plans that never truly fail until the script needs them to — the stakes evaporate. The Hollywood Reporter called it the “Star Trek Redshirt problem”: leads who are essentially invincible while everyone around them is expendable. You stop worrying and start watching the clock.

The film was originally shot in 2023 and sat on a shelf before Ritchie went back in for reshoots and re-editing. The final cut runs 98 minutes including credits, and several critics noted that the seams show — jagged continuity, plot holes, an ending that feels like it arrives before the movie is ready to let go. “Some extra time could have not only paid off all that planning Sid and Bronco do in more impressive ways,” Collider wrote, “but also given the characters more space to feel like actual characters.”

The Bromance Is Real, Even If the Movie Isn’t

If there’s one thing generating genuine warmth around In the Grey‘s release, it’s a behind-the-scenes clip of Gyllenhaal being completely, cheerfully unable to stop complimenting his co-star.

“It’s so nice to tell you how wonderful I think you are,” Gyllenhaal says in the clip. “I’m just here, really, to just gaze at Henry Cavill. I don’t even know how to answer anything. I just — when I stare at him, I can’t stop.” He then jokes that Cavill has “nothing up here,” pointing to his head. Cavill, laughing, fires back: “Terribly underhanded compliment.”

It’s the most personality either man shows in any footage connected to this movie — which is either a great advertisement for their real-life chemistry or a quietly damning indictment of what Ritchie gave them to do on screen.

All three stars are Ritchie regulars at this point. Gyllenhaal starred in his 2023 Afghan war film The Covenant. Cavill headlined The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. González appeared in both Ministry and Ritchie’s recent fantasy adventure Fountain of Youth. Their comfort with each other and with Ritchie’s rhythms comes through — and the Hollywood Reporter, perhaps most generously, noted that Cavill and Gyllenhaal “underplay in such appealingly relaxed fashion they seem to be angling for the chance to star in Sid and Bronco 2.”

Whether audiences will want that sequel depends on whether they find In the Grey‘s particular brand of gorgeous, frictionless competence satisfying or exhausting. Critics, by and large, landed on the latter. But there’s a version of this audience — the one that just wants to watch two extremely handsome men in excellent shirts execute impossible plans in beautiful locations — for whom this movie will do exactly what it promises.

Just don’t go in expecting anyone to break a sweat.