In the Grey (2026)
Guy Ritchie has built a career on a particular kind of cinema: stylised, kinetic, populated by sharp-tongued characters who move through elaborately engineered set-pieces with more swagger than sense. At its best in, for example, Lock, Stock, Snatch, even the Sherlock Holmes films, this formula produces something genuinely exhilarating. In the Grey suggests that a formula, repeated often enough, eventually becomes its own subject matter.
Rachel Wild (Eiza González) works as a financial extraction specialist for a shadowy New York firm whose ethical contours are left diplomatically vague; the film is not especially interested in examining them. When a ruthless overseas operator steals a billion dollars belonging to Rachel’s employers, she is dispatched to retrieve it, accompanied by two operatives: the laconic Brit Sid (Henry Cavill) and the cocksure American Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal). What follows is a reverse-heist thriller shot largely in the Canary Islands, built around elaborate planning sequences, coordinated infiltration, and a series of obstacles overcome with less friction than the genre usually bothers to simulate.
Cavill and Gyllenhaal have a watchable, unhurried chemistry, trading barbed observations with the kind of performative nonchalance both actors do convincingly. Ritchie’s direction stays technically assured; the action sequences are crisply composed, and Ed Wild’s cinematography makes Tenerife look like a credible thriller landscape. The film’s second half, once the operation finally gets airborne, generates genuine forward momentum, which is enough to sustain interest even if it is not enough to generate much retrospective enthusiasm.
The first half tells a different story. It is given almost entirely to exposition: characters explain the plan, arrange its components, and walk the audience through each moving part with an earnestness that treats comprehension as a substitute for engagement. There is something almost philosophically curious in this approach, a kind of radical transparency about intent, except that knowing what a magician is about to do with the handkerchief does not, in my experience, make the trick more interesting.
The villain, Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem), is a billionaire crime lord Hollywood has been casting in various costumes for decades: untouchable, ruthless, and given no interiority that might complicate the audience’s response to him. The film gestures at something pointed here, the accumulator of wealth who operates beyond conventional accountability, but pulls back before that observation becomes an argument. A film willing to press that point might have had something to say about the structures that produce such figures; this one treats the observation as set dressing.
González carries the most weight and works hard at it, though the script equips her with competence as a substitute for character development. Rosamund Pike appears as her employer and does what Pike reliably does with underwritten material, which is considerably more than the material deserves.
In the Grey knows what it is, and in my opinion has settled for it a little too readily. Ritchie’s style and momentum are on display, the banter is periodically sharp, and there are stretches where that combination is enough. What the film cannot supply is a persuasive reason to invest in the outcome. And a heist that never puts you in genuine doubt about its conclusion is, in the end, less a thriller than a demonstration.