Netflix knows that, if you want to get people talking about your new action movie franchise, all you gotta do is involve some controversial mustache talk. That’s clearly why Chris Evans is rocking a really bad mustache in the first trailer for its upcoming action blockbuster, The Gray Man. Evans plays the film’s villain on a quest to kill Ryan Gosling’s Court Gentry in a movie by the Russo Brothers.
Based on the book series by Mark Greaney that kicked off with a novel of the same name, The Gray Man clearly represents Netflix’s desire to launch its own spy franchise that can compete with Bond, Bourne, and Mission: Impossible. Court Gentry is the Gray Man, a CIA operative sent in to kill people when the U.S. really shouldn’t be killing people. However, he’s now in the crosshairs of the damn-near-psychopathic Lloyd Hansen (Evans), who has captured Court’s former handler, Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton), and turned him against him. Thankfully, Court has Ana de Armas to help him out, because as No Time to Die showed us, she is an action star in the making.
The Russo Brothers are working regularly with Netflix after the success of Extraction, and they are set to direct the film from a screenplay by Joe Russo, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely. The The Gray Man trailer shows a movie that feels a lot like Bourne in terms of plot but is pushing into Fast and Furious levels of ridiculous action. If nothing else, it looks like it will be a massive, action-filled romp, which we know the Russos can put together after movies like Avengers: Endgame, but it doesn’t seem to be all that original aside from Evans rocking a strong mustache game. That might be why Netflix is actually releasing this movie on the big screen, not just streaming. The studio realizes a film like this needs to go boom real big to work, though it’s still only releasing it in select theaters on July 15.
The rest of us will have to wait for the film to drop on Netflix on July 22 to watch Gosling punch Chris Evan’s mustache.
