A geographically challenged movie

I tried watching Netflix's The Gray Man but had to give up after about 30 minutes.

Look, I thought for the first 10 or so minutes I was willing to go along with it - our hero seemed to have a conscience and wouldn't kill an innocent by standing kid, and the subsequent fight around fireworks going off was at least different.   

But the first warning that this movie was going off the rails was the apparent overnight trip by tuk tuk from Bangkok to Chang Mai.  Wait a minute, I thought:  isn't Chang Mai way in the middle of the country, at elevation, and no way you would make the trip overnight by tuk tuk.   And I was right - Google says it's nearly 700 km, and there are posts from Thai media apparently indicating that tourists who are thinking about copying the trip are saying "The Gray Man lied to me".   I think I saw someone saying you would more realistically allow 5 days (I assume tuk tuks are not known for good speed or climbing performance) but who knows, that might be an exaggeration in the other direction.

But then we had a terribly staged and edited CGI heavy plane flight and mid air struggle for a parachute that was completely and utterly unconvincing and mundane.   (And it started stupidly - no indication of how our hero anticipated that he was about to be stabbed by someone who had appeared to be an old friend.)   It only served to remind me of the actual quality stuntwork of Mission Impossible films, or nearly any Bond film, and how this whole sequence suffered from Marvel over-reliance on CGI, which replaces dramatic stakes with movement and colour. 

Then there was a very short shot which I am pretty sure was meant to show an Australian based quasi military hit squad of some kind getting on an aircraft - with the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the background.  As if there was a runway at Garden Island instead of a naval base.  [I double checked this last night - the Opera House is there too, so yeah, it's as if they are getting on a significantly sized military aircraft either at Woolloomooloo Wharf, or Garden Island.]   

As I said, geography is not a strong point of the film, despite it repeatedly jumping around the world.

There followed a painfully badly written bit of dialogue between our hero and a teen girl he was to protect, and I gave up.

I see that it has scored only 46% on Rottentomatoes, although a suspiciously high audience score of 91%.   Is it possible that Netflix, having allegedly spent a couple of hundred million dollars, has paid for some positive audience feedback via some PR company?  It can't be hard to organise that, surely.

Anyway, I am starting to worry about Netflix and whoever it is that is greenlighting projects.

When I think about it, the things that have been "working" for the network have been pretty original (even if I don't endorse them) - like Squid Games, The Queen's Gambit, even Stranger Things is kind of original even if deliberately 80's retro.   What about the Roma movie - a black and white family drama set in Mexico in the 1960's - pretty original. 

But when they come to recent movies, it feels mainly like very tired retreads of old movie tropes that heavily rely on star power to generate interest.   And for me, that's not enough.* 

 

*  Alert readers might think "what about The Power of the Dog, which was pretty original, but you didn't like that."  Ah well, my rationalisation for that was that it was a retread of tired Jane Campion tropes, and she's never interested me.