‘In the Grey’ Review: Jake Gyllenhaal, Henry Cavill and Eiza Gonzalez Magazine-Cover Their Way Through Guy Ritchie’s Attractive Time-Killer

Guy Ritchie is a filmmaker and series creator whose prodigious busyness in terms of both workload and story approach has its compensations. It’s foolish to expect what is so rarely a part of Ritchie’s subset of heist movies, from early ones like “Snatch” a generation ago, through to his latest, “In the Grey.” In these films you won’t find much on the inside of what used to be known as “characters.” The surfaces, the outsides, are all. With “In the Grey,” you make your allowances as a viewer and stay focused on the threads, and the wristwatches.

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The actor-models this time are all Ritchie alums. Jake Gyllenhaal starred in the 2023 Afghan war saga “The Convenant.” Henry Cavill headlined Ritchie’s “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” (2015) and the WWII action outing “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” (2024). Eiza Gonzalez co-starred in the latter as well as Ritchie’s fantasy quest “Fountain of Youth” (2025).

“In the Grey” combines Ritchie’s penchant for inhuman levels of grace under pressure; honor and loyalty to your mates, even if the audience never learns the supporting mates’ names; and expository dumps delivered largely in voiceover. First up for voiceover duty is debt-collection ace and legal genius Rachel Wild (Gonzalez), hired by a ruthless Manhattan asset manager (Rosamund Pike, putting the “eel” in “steely”) to retrieve $1 billion borrowed and then stolen by an underworld kingpin (Carlos Bardem) whose private island is equipped with a private army.

Piece of cake! En route to the money re-grab, “In the Grey” lays out elaborately visualized plans for Rachel and her go-to mercenary duo, extraction and surveillance pros Sidney (Cavill) and Bronco (Gyllenhaal). They’re the best there is, anticipating the kind of trouble Rachel will likely encounter as she negotiates with the kingpin and his attorney (Fisher Stevens, waiting in vain for better material). Ritchie goes relatively easy on the joy-of-killing stuff, at least until the climax, and there’s an engaging couple of minutes en route thanks to the simplest, cleanest action filmmaking the film has to offer: a chase involving motorcycles, police cars and some proficient editing.

Ritchie and company shot most of “In the Grey” on the Spanish island of Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, and in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where film production rebates recently reached a super-competitive 60 percent. This didn’t apply to Ritchie’s project; “In the Grey” was filmed in 2023, and after languishing a bit, Ritchie reshot and re-edited, apparently to whack and whittle the movie down to an acceptably confusing 90 minutes or so minus credits.

For half-laughs as well as clarity, a lot of the mission’s step-by-step details appear on the screen, as wee notes scribbled right on top of the action. (Or stasis.) Elsewhere Ritchie summarizes like an AI overview, with generic phases of the extraction plan, endlessly rehearsed in montages, broken down on screen, in large-font lists. Well, it’s one way to go. It’s also a way that 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.

Laden with dialogue concerning asset management world dominance, “In the Grey” more damagingly errs in making everything too easy for its own rooting interests. The clinically meticulous plans may go awry in the last lap, as they must. By then, however, the not-quite-human quality of the smoothies on screen — the clothes and timepieces notwithstanding — has undermined the movie’s modest star-driven mission.