IN THE GREY Review: Guy Ritchie's Heist Thriller Talks Itself Into Tedium

Few filmmakers working today are as prolific as Guy Ritchie.

 

The English filmmaker who emerged on the scene with London gangster films Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch has helmed a whopping nine movies in the past nine years, and has another one on the way later in 2026. His recent efforts have yielded mixed results and primarily found success when allowing Ritchie’s unique style of directing, editing, and dialogue to flourish.

 

His latest movie, In the Grey, as the title suggests, exists very much in the grey, bolstering an impressive cast and periodic bursts of Ritchie’s trademark style yet marred by excessive exposition and dull characters.

 

In the Grey stars Eiza González as Rachel, a lawyer paid by a private-equity powerhouse (Rosamund Pike) to retrieve $1 billion from crime lord Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem). To pull off the job, Rachel recruits Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Sid (Henry Cavill), two lethal and quick-witted operatives, and together they get roped into a seemingly impossible heist that evolves into a fight for survival. 

 

It’s difficult to break new ground for heist movies in a genre dominated by classics like Heat and The Italian Job. Ritchie accomplishes this feat, however, albeit not in the manner he intended. González’s Rachel opens the film with a voiceover that overly explains the title as she discusses how she fluctuates between the legal and illegal, moral and immoral, and you guessed it, works “in the grey.” The voiceover is certainly cliche and a bit on-the-nose, but it effectively lays the foundation for our protagonist and the heist she embarks on. 

 

Where In the Grey begins to err is in its incessant resistance to break free from exposition, explanation, and voiceover. Some of the most tantalizing scenes of heist movies are those in which the thieves map out their grand plan, before they inevitably hit bumps in the road, but Ritchie, who both wrote and directed the film, structures an entire movie around such scenes. The adage ‘show, don’t tell’ clearly didn’t stick for Ritchie, as his screenplay features a mind-boggling amount of voiceover and refuses to let its story play out organically.

 

The exposition-heavy screenplay renders In the Grey an oddly paced film. Much of the action is saved for the third act, but audience interest is likely to have dissipated by this point after being spoken to by Gonzalez and Gyllenhaal for over an hour. 

 

All this talk would be tolerable if Ritchie engineered interesting characters to follow, but this is far from the case. Cavill and Gyllenhaal have both previously worked with Ritchie (on far better films) and seemingly reteamed with the filmmaker given their positive prior experiences. Ritchie lets his performers down, however, by drafting two personality-devoid caricatures who are virtually indistinguishable from one another and relegated to spitting out generic one-liners with none of the shock or wit Ritchie’s characters are known for. 

 

Contrary to what the promotional material would have you think, Eiza González serves as the film’s protagonist and is, by quite some distance, the best part of the film. González has taken on some genuinely interesting roles in recent years, most recently as Violeta in Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters. Her snappy dialogue delivery and undeniable screen presence carries Ritchie’s film through much of its mundanity, although, eventually, the weight of this task becomes too overwhelming. Not even a performer as enthralling as González can salvage a film so by-the-numbers.

 

To his credit, Ritchie populates his film with bursts of his trademark style, albeit not nearly enough. The most disappointing quality of his previous film, the Indiana Jones rip-off Fountain of Youth, was that even the most fervent Ritchie fan would not have been able to identify that Ritchie made the film. In the Grey certainly feels more like the product of Ritchie’s singular mind, and yet the unevenness and wit-deprived script means the English filmmaker doesn’t come close to the stylistic peaks of The Gentlemen or even The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

 

As has become abundantly clear, Guy Ritchie excels best when handling material that liberates him to embrace his signature quirkiness, style, and grit. While this can definitely get out of hand (look no further than King Arthur: Legend of the Sword), there is an undeniably electric energy to a bona fide Ritchie picture. In the Grey benefits from the style that recent efforts like Fountain of Youth and The Covenant were devoid of, and yet it is a far cry to his earlier work.

 

Ritchie may be one of the industry’s most prolific working directors, but the beloved filmmaker would probably benefit from prioritizing quality over quantity for a bit and honing in on a film that enables him to wholeheartedly embrace his trademark style within the confines of a more manageable and well-constructed story.