Guy Ritchie’s In the Grey, a bizarrely buried action caper made in 2023, is heading for an underwhelming opening weekend after a release run that was bought, sold and redated three times. The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Henry Cavill and Eiza González, and it arrives with critics largely kept away and no press screenings.
The review describes the movie as a sly, surprisingly serious thriller and says there is still “a great deal of fun” in the director’s latest work. That is not nothing for a film that has spent much of its life in motion before audiences ever had the chance to see it. The review also places In the Grey inside Ritchie’s recent string of lower-tier action films, a run that has included Wrath of Man, Operation Fortune and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, even if those projects have generally been solidly enjoyable.
Ritchie’s first sole writing credit since 2019’s The Gentlemen follows Rachel, a lawyer who tries to recover unpaid debts from dangerous figures on behalf of shadowy financial firms. Her latest target is Salazar, who owes $1bn, and she brings in Sid and Bronco, played by Cavill and Gyllenhaal, to help keep her safe. That setup gives the film its cleanest hook: a debt-collection mission with guns pointed at everyone in the room.
That premise has been in the public pipeline for a while, but the path to release has been anything but smooth. Lionsgate bought the film and then sold it, and the film was pushed back and reshaped again and again before this weekend’s rollout. For a title with three big-name leads and a director who still has an audience for brisk, watchable genre work, the long delay is part of the story now. It suggests a studio and filmmakers who never quite found the right moment, or maybe the right confidence, to put it in front of the public.
Even so, the review’s most pointed judgment is that the movie still has enough wit and momentum to work on its own terms. That leaves In the Grey in a familiar but awkward place for Ritchie: not a prestige event, not a disaster, and not the kind of release that seems likely to break through the clutter. What happens next is simple enough. The box office will tell whether Cavill, Gyllenhaal and González can turn a delayed handoff into a real audience, or whether this one becomes another title that drifted too long before it landed.
For more on the film and its stars, see Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill lead Guy Ritchie’s In the Grey review.
