Is This The Worst Portrayal of CIA Agents in Movie?

While I’ve been quite swayed with the netflix production of South Korean cinema, I decided to check out American production again. After scrolling through some of them, my choice was “ The Gray Man”, a film released back in 2022 starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans. As much as I think that it could be a promising one, I ended up questioning a lot of things after watching this film. The Gray Man is available on Netflix.

This film starts with the scene inside a prison in Florida where a CIA agent named “ Donald Fitzroy” was offering Courtland ( Ryan Gosling) a job to be part of CIA’s secret program called Sierra. In this program, Fitzroy is collecting criminals who will be trained to be someone that can kill but also vanishes without leaving a trace. They are known as the gray man. The film shift to the scene when Courtland, now is known as agent six is currently working on a mission in Bangkok to assasinate someone who allegedly is selling national information that was dangerous for the country if it’s leaked. They had some battle and in the end, the man revealed that he was agent four sierra and told Courtland that the agency is going to kill off every Sierra agent. Before dying, agent four handed out a necklace containing a memory which revealed to contain the dirt from the current CIA chief Denny Carmichael.

Chaos ensues when Six decided not to continue with his mission and was airlifted to the safe house with the help of Donald Fitzroy. At the same time, in the base Carmichael was trying to catch Six and attempt to kill him. Since his attempt was failed, he ended up hiring a former sierra agent turned into the private sector Lloyd (Chris Evans). The problem is, Lloyd is known to be sociopath and even during the chase of six, he tortured Fitzroy. Both of them (Six and Llyod) ended up meeting in Prague and they were doing open shooting during daytime. It was chaotic and with a hostage named Claire, the mission became a lot more complicated with Six. In the end, the corruption that Charmichael did was never revealed with Six and Claire’s ending was still an open-ended question.

In this film, there are so many flaws and that it feels like the story is totally made up. I know it’s a fiction but a lot of fiction I’ve read at least is making quite a sense. First the open shooting in prague where people are present, “ how did that not make a headline?” I mean in this day and age, those type of shooting would make it everywhere. Second of all, it’s not so much of a gray man, where I thought Six would really know how to blend in. Another thing that I find just absurd was how he drove tuktuk from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, like how in the world the thai police doesn’t caught him :D. Bangkok to chiang mai is more than 10 hours by bus and even more by train. Can you imagine going by tuk tuk? What shown was it was late at night in Bangkok and then around midday the next day. From all the CIA operation movies I managed to watch, this one just made me left bewildered. I had quite expectations but everything felt just pure action and thrilled. It was a good amount of time I invested into watching it but it turned out to be so flop. The only thing that’s forgivable is the casts, who saved the movie from being a total disaster.