If this isn’t Guy Ritchie’s stupidest movie, I’m not sure what is. Dude lost his muse Charlie Hunnam and now he’s been relegated to making biennial period pieces after years of excellent work. Cavill and Gonzalez are returning cast members in the Ritchie ensemble while Gyllenhaal plays a flatter version of himself. He and Cavill play sort of “brothers in crime” with an almost mystical ability to shoot up bad guys and get out of tight spots. Because they are so supernaturally adept at their jobs, the movie has to keep throwing unidentified police and paramilitary forces at them in an increasingly horrific meatgrinder that really only gets some perspective when a member of the (bloated) team bites the dust and everyone sort of throws their hands up and moves on. In the Grey as a premise is weirdly specific and also sort of dumb–Gonzalez as Ms WILD goes around helping big banks recover their bad loans from criminals by using a variety of tactics both legal and illegal, which might be a thrilling bit of corporate espionage to include in the movie but mostly consists of some guy with an Australian accent tapping things out on a keyboard and then literally shouting the information into the phone for the gang to hear. So despite the team being explicitly from two different and distinct pressure points, we really only see the more exciting one and let the same grumpy judge kind of do the work of the other half of Wild’s business in montage.
More on that air of invulnerability that surrounds the two headliner: their insulation from the hail of bullets falling on them from every direction weirdly takes the suspense out of the fire fight scenes, which is wild because wholly like 80% of this movie is fire fights with some court room stuff sprinkled throughout. Because they can’t get hurt and they kill every guy who comes within a mile of them, we’re sort of reduced to watching them slowly traverse through extremely well laid plans, which, again, wouldn’t be a problem except that the script is really fixated on the planning process of developing multiple contingencies for a heist? a tense meeting? unclear! to occur, so much so that people are drawing diagrams in the sand about it and jump cutting to different locations that will become significant later, then, we’re sort of prepared to think that something will go fantastically wrong despite their planning which will necessitate some slapdash solutions very much suited to Ritchie action comedy, but, no, to everyone’s surprise and disappointment, the scenes work out largely exactly to plan in the order and manner in which it was previously described. You’d think that a movie with essentially three locations on the same small island would last no more than maybe 70 minutes, but you’d be wrong because if we constantly lurch from scene to scene on motorbikes and then circulate between those points and prepare for stuff to happen there we can get a full two hours out of that carousel of horrors.
But none of that stuff is as important as the completely what the fuck moment that occurs sort of in the final act of the movie that I am certain is going to be the only thing that sticks with you about this movie. Rosamund Pike has a sort of weirdly ancillary role in this movie almost copypasta’d from Now You See Me: Now You Don’t from last year, which means we largely see her on phone calls in a totally different country from everyone else. Anyway, in the final act she gets home-invaded while she’s working out on a treadmill but she’s wearing like a SILK SHIRT and SLACKS completely inappropriate for her activity in every way possible and it’s not just a light workout, like leisurely stroll while doing some light reading of the charts, she is sweating profusely and has a water bottle with her!
It’s such a jarring costume choice it takes you out of the movie so fast and then there’s no accounting for it, like the characters don’t comment on it as a thing, they just accept it as reality and move on. I don’t know if there’s a comprehensive list of movies that contain a poorly scripted home gym situation, but if there is I need to know what happened here.
