• Guy Ritchie’s In the Grey hits theaters May 15, 2026, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Henry Cavill, and Eiza González
• Critics agree the film looks gorgeous but struggles to give its leads anything meaningful to do
• González is widely cited as the standout, with Cavill and Gyllenhaal coasting on easy charm
• The 98-minute film was shot in 2023, shelved, then reshot and re-edited before release
• A BTS clip of Gyllenhaal gushing over Cavill’s looks is going viral ahead of the opening

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.

The post In the Grey Review: Gyllenhaal and Cavill Look Great, Feel Empty appeared first on Cream.

• Amazon MGM Studios confirmed at its Upfront presentation that the live-action Voltron movie will skip theaters entirely
• The film will premiere on Prime Video or add-on channel MGM+ in 2027
• Henry Cavill stars as King Alfur, with Sterling K. Brown as villain Zarkon and Rita Ora as the witch Haggar
• Director Rawson Marshall Thurber built a massive physical rig called the “Lion’s Den” to capture actors’ reactions during robot combat sequences
• Fans have reacted with frustration, arguing the film’s scale demands a big-screen experience

The live-action Voltron movie has been a long time coming — over 20 years in development, to be exact — and fans finally have an update. Unfortunately, it’s not the one they were hoping for.

Amazon MGM Studios announced during its Amazon Upfront slate presentation that the highly anticipated Voltron film starring Henry Cavill will bypass theaters entirely and premiere directly on Prime Video, or possibly add-on channel MGM+. The movie is still on track for a 2027 release, but it won’t be roaring into multiplexes anywhere along the way.

The reaction from fans was immediate and, to put it mildly, not great. “Is it that bad that they have to cancel theatrical release? Because a movie like this would have sold tickets,” one fan wrote on Twitter. Another put it more bluntly: “Not every blockbuster needs theaters, but giant robots fighting in space definitely feels like one that does.” Reddit threads in the Voltron community echoed the sentiment, with many fans arguing that a property built around colossal robot lions merging into a towering warrior deserves the biggest screen possible.

Not everyone was devastated, though. “Love the hell out of this,” one viewer responded. “Going to theaters is in the past for me.” But that camp appears to be in the minority when it comes to the core fanbase.

A Dream Project With a Blockbuster Cast

What makes the news sting a little more is just how much ambition has clearly gone into this production. Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber — the filmmaker behind Red Notice, Central Intelligence, and Dodgeball — Voltron was co-written by Thurber and Ellen Shanman. Thurber has described himself as a longtime fan of the original cartoon, and his commitment to the source material has been evident from the start.

The production team actually constructed a massive physical rig called the “Lion’s Den” to throw actors around and capture genuine physical reactions during robot combat sequences — a deliberate move to reduce heavy CGI reliance and ground the action in something tactile and real. That kind of practical ambition is exactly what you’d expect from a film designed to dazzle on an IMAX screen.

The cast matches that scale. Henry Cavill — currently riding high with his new Guy Ritchie action film In The Grey and deep into production on the long-awaited Highlander remake — will reportedly play King Alfur, a legendary warrior and former ruler of the planet Altea. Sterling K. Brown takes on Zarkon, the film’s primary villain and Alfur’s nemesis. Rita Ora plays the witch Haggar. Rounding out the ensemble are Alba Baptista, John Harlan Kim, Samson Kayo, Tharanya Tharan, Daniel Quinn-Toye, Laura Gordon, Tim Griffin, and Nathan Jones.

Quinn-Toye is a notable newcomer to keep an eye on — he previously served as Tom Holland’s understudy in the West End production of Romeo and Juliet.

Plot details remain tightly under wraps, but Thurber offered fans a glimpse of his vision when he addressed the crowd at VoltCon in Indianapolis via video back in 2024. “I want to make sure that we stay true to the heart and the spirit of Voltron,” he said. “In this film, we’re going to be introducing an entirely new generation of pilots. We’ve reimagined Voltron for the live-action world, but we’re going to stay true to…those iconic elements that you love, that I love.”

Twenty Years in the Making

The road to getting Voltron to any screen has been extraordinarily long. The project was first announced in 2005 by The Mark Gordon Company, then spent years bouncing between studios including New Regency and Universal Pictures before Amazon MGM Studios entered negotiations with Hasbro for the rights in 2022 — rights that were officially granted in early 2026. Filming wrapped last summer.

The source material has its own layered history. The original Voltron: Defender of the Universe was born in 1984 when World Events Productions took the Japanese animated series Beast King GoLion (and later Kikou Kantai Dairugger XV), dubbed it with American voice actors, and unleashed it on American kids. The show ran for 124 episodes and became a defining piece of ’80s pop culture — five young pilots commanding giant robotic lions that could merge into the massive warrior robot Voltron to battle the evil Zarkon and his army of monsters called Robeasts.

The franchise never really went away. There were revivals in the ’90s, and most recently Voltron: Legendary Defender, which ran for eight seasons on Netflix starting in 2016 and earned a strong following of its own. The live-action film was announced in 2022, with producers Todd Lieberman, David Hoberman, and Bob Koplar — head of World Events Productions and owner of the Voltron IP — attached.

Why This Decision Raises Questions

The straight-to-streaming call is a curious one from a business standpoint. A film with a recognizable IP, a marquee star in Cavill, a blockbuster-level supporting cast, and clearly significant production investment would seem like a natural theatrical bet — if nothing else, to recoup some of its budget at the box office before landing on streaming. Amazon has been willing to send other big swings to theaters, which makes the Voltron decision feel like a signal worth paying attention to.

Whether that signal is about the film’s quality, Amazon’s evolving strategy for its streaming platform, or simply a scheduling calculation, nobody outside the studio is saying. What’s undeniable is that fans who have waited decades for this movie — and who grew up watching those lions lock into place on Saturday morning TV — feel like they’re being denied something.

As one fan put it on Reddit: the small screen just isn’t right for this epic clash.

Amazon also revealed the film’s official logo alongside the announcement. For now, 2027 is the target, and Prime Video is where the lions will land.

The post Henry Cavill’s Voltron Movie Is Skipping Theaters appeared first on Cream.