YMMV / The Gray Man (2022)

• Complete Monster: Lloyd Hansen is a hilarious but nonetheless vile hired gun who contracts himself out to the CIA for its dirtiest of jobs. A serial torturer who greatly enjoys inflicting pain, Lloyd is introduced attaching a car battery to a victim's face and later rips out the fingernails of another, both with sadistic satisfaction. Dispatched to eliminate the rogue Sierra Six, Lloyd sends his trigger-happy thugs after Six with orders to gun down swathes of civilians should the need arise, leading to countless deaths of innocents. Treating his own allies with no better regard than his enemies, Lloyd shoots his own pilot for hesitation on an order; guns down a mercenary when he's outlived his usefulness; and routinely threatens and humiliates his partners for fun. To weed out Six once and for all, Lloyd kidnaps the young Claire Fitzroy and threatens her with torture and death to lure Six to him, Lloyd encompassing the true monstrosity of his character by cheerfully noting "if your strategy relies on whether or not I'll kill a child, you need a new strategy."
• Evil Is Cool: Lloyd Hansen. He's a sociopathic monster, but Chris Evans's charismatic and gleefully hammy performance makes him very entertaining, and he's badass enough that he's able to take on Six in a fight and win even while missing two of his fingers.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • Let's be honest, you're here to watch Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans duke it out, story be damned.
  • Some are also interested to see how Ana de Armas fares in a spy/action film before her tenure in the John Wick spinoff Ballerina aside from her appearance in No Time to Die.
• Love to Hate: Lloyd is a sadistic monster, but he's so dammed cheerful and witty about it it's hard not to love him, while still rooting for his downfall.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Imprisoned for murdering his abusive father to stop him from drowning his brother, Courtland "Court" Gentry was recruited into the CIA as a black ops assassin under the codename "Sierra Six". After his dying target passes him an incriminating USB drive proving that his boss, Denny Carmichael, is involved in criminal activity, Six goes rogue. When Carmichael has his lackey Lloyd Hansen kidnap Six's mentor Donald Fitzroy and Fitzroy's niece Claire, Six tracks Claire's location down with her pacemaker, storms Hansen's base and rescues Claire, all while taking down squads of mercernaries sent after him. While he and Claire are captured shortly afterward, Six fakes unresponsiveness while recuperating from his injuries, breaks out of government custody and rescues Claire.
  • Lone Wolf, real name Avik San, is a mercenary hired to retrieve the USB drive from Sierra Six. Cornering him in a hospital, he defeats both Six and his ally Dani Miranda in hand-to-hand combat before successfully fleeing with the drive. Passing the drive to Lloyd Hansen, he is appalled to learn that Hansen has kidnapped and is threatening to kill a little girl. Surviving after the room he was in was struck by an RPG, Lone Wolf re-retrieves the drive and runs into Miranda again. After beating her in a brief fight, Lone Wolf hands the drive over to her out of disgust towards Hansen's methods.
• Signature Scene: Many fans believe that the Prague action sequence is the closest thing the film has to this, with the stunts/choreography, increasing Serial Escalation, and score by Henry Jackman being praised. Some have even compared it to the Washington D.C. highway battle from Captain America: The Winter Soldier in terms of sheer intensity.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus of the movie is that it is a passable and generally pleasing action flick but fails to be particularly memorable.