The Gray Man

Everyone I've heard speak about this movie trashes it,  but I think I'm the first person I know to actually WATCH it.  It isn't as bad as advertised.  Heck, I'll go so far as to say it was good by the standards of generic action movies.  

Was the CGI bad? In the case of the setting chosen for the climax, you betcha. That looked like they created it on my old Compaq All-in- One from 1996. But do you really care,  given all the action on screen at that moment? Nah.

And the action in Gray Man is impressive.  The Prague sequence alone was worth the proverbial cost of admission. 

Chris Evans was devilishly good in his turn as the field level bad guy,  even with his goofy mustache.  To my great chagrin, Ryan Gosling played a convincing operative, and unlike with most action heroes, his humor seemed genuine and actually,  you know … funny.

Now this is based on the book of the same name by Mark Greaney, and while significant details were added and subtracted to the story,  it retains the recognizable skeleton of the source material. Honestly,  it's better than the book, which I found tedious and which treated the character as an indestructible Superman. 

Don't get me wrong.  This isn't Shakespeare or even Die Hard. You can see the plot points coming from across town.  But it is entertaining, and the last time I checked,  that's the reason for movies in the first place.

Watch it.