In the Grey Sludge
I watched the movie "In the Grey". It's basically "run around and pointlessly kill people" mixed random action movie tropes done badly. Action sludge.As you are likely aware already, if stuff has glaring flaws I tend to point them out. This sludge was full of such flaws so I'm going to detail them for you.
I don't really hate this movie, it was just kind of mediocre, so this explanation may be kind of lacking my usual fire. Apologies to those looking for the high intensity fire. I only have low intensity sludge mixing fire for this one.
There are so many flaws I'm not sure which one to start with, so I'll just go through them in order I remembered them while brainstorming what I can recall between the pointless shooting.
"Someone has to stay behind and press the buttons"
This was an actual line in the movie ( or at least the best I can remember whatever bs they actually said ). It made no sense in universe ( or out of it in our universe for that matter ) because the line is said as explanation of why one guy is hanging back in the villa rigged with explosives to set them off to kill all the bad guys as the MCs run away.
This is obviously rehashing the grey puke trope of "I have to sacrifice myself to let you all escape by doing -whatever-".
The trouble is that in the movie the thing to set off the bombs is a remote radio control with a button. So there is zero need to be there. That's like the whole point of a bomb remote with a button.
Somehow these guys don't get that. I guess too much drugs to build muscles and not enough mental activities to not be dumb as rocks?
So anyway, dumbass guy stays behind and blows himself up while another MC cries "No!!!!" 2 seconds later this is forgotten and the action continues.
MC must go to island. Because plot.
The main character, random attractive thin female, is supposed to be a badass debt collector who works with a gang of lawyers and thugs. She is "the good guy" in TFM. Only she isn't. She's just another bad guy imo with a bunch of thugs that go around killing people.
The ENTIRE fucking plot of this crapass sludgefest is that she needs to go to an island owned by the main bad guy to negotiate him to repay his debt, and that he'll then try to kill her, therefore she brings her gang of thugs to the island too and they train to help her escape when bad guy inevitably tries to kill her.
Which makes no damned sense. There is zero reason for her to go there at all. Just hide somewhere and use a VPN and Zoom. The end. Nobody needs to die. Movie over.
So movie exists, movie needs plot, plot authors make up idiotic shit, we get this grey sludge.
Success. Money repaid. Sludge vat not empty yet
So you watch TFM, and MC does random bs to bad guy to make bad guy suffer, and bad guy eventually says "ok I'll pay".
You kind of grunt and think "eh, anticlimactic, but I guess that was the plot."
Oh no. There is still more sludge left in the vat that they want to shovel down your throat. Because before this point in the movie there was all this pointless training and practice for escaping her from the island ( including breaking her out of jail ).
Now, there's all sorts of stuff I have to say about what the fuck was the point of all that training. It's clear that they just took the fucking plot for the action and then decided to show us the actors preparing for the pre-destined plot. It's that dumb. But anyway...
So it gets to the point where bad guy pays his debt.
At this point the movie seems over. But we are dumped into some half-assed explanation of "no wait, getting the bad guy to repay his debts isn't the end, because the person MC was recovering the money for it is also corrupt scum and won't pay what they agreed to MC for doing so."
You sit there for a few seconds with the movie pours sludge on you and think "uh, I guess, but wouldn't that be a sequel or something?" Then they beam another half hour of sludgefest into your eyeballs. That sludge-fest? Bad guy kidnaps MC and takes her back to the island, so that good guy thug party can act out the plans you watched them preparing for the whole movie.
It's stupid. Like okay there is action. Thugs run around and kill other thugs.
It's about as enjoyable as watching a teenager play any random FPS.
But wait, let's discuss the random other deaths and tropes and bullshit this crap factory has to offer.
Hear me out. Pit trap. For car.
Apparently the writers for this sludge thought "pit traps are cool" and decided to throw in a pit trap to stop one of the random chasing cars in a chase scene.
This is portrayed as a major brilliant idea in their escape scheme. Really.
Suppressors, because cool.
In one scene the MCs mutter something about "let's use -suppressors-" and then screw them onto their guns. Only there is zero fucking reason to do this. They just do it, I think, because the director thinks suppressed guns sound cooler? I don't fucking know. It makes no sense
Generic gang of thugs.
I mentioned that MC leads a gang of thugs. They are that forgettable and meaningless. One of the forgettable generic grey sludge thugs is Henry Cavill. TFM is so bad that they turn a quality actor into a generic meaningless thug who just runs around and shoots people. That's his whole character here. :snore:
Magic Computer Hacking Totem
Did you know you can hack someone's computer by just setting a magic device nearby? Cool huh?
TFM does this. They say some crap about the bad guy's accountant's room being a faraday cage, therefore they can't hack in from the outside, so they need to smuggle in a totem that has a hidden hacking thing in it.
When the totem is close enough to the accountant's PC, it can hack in and get everything, via... magic. They throw in the word "Tempest" to pretend they are being reasonable.
It's stupid. If they had not said "faraday cage" or "tempest" I might have just ignored it. But they said that shit, which is just stupid.
Faraday cages don't work that way. You can't put a signal device inside the fucking faraday cage to get information out. Now, ok, one could reason that it can hack the machine and smuggle out the data through the regular internet connection or some such, but that is not the implication here. Besides that would/could be detected by a good bad guy firewall.
Anyway, the magic hacking totem is stupid.
Armor proofed vehicles? Nah.
Throughout the movie they drive vehicles around intending to be in gun fights and chases with them. None of them have armor proofing. Because that would reduce the feeling of danger right? Blah.
These guys are supposed to be extremely careful geniuses used to dealing with super dangerous criminals, and they use no armor proofing?
I also don't once see them don any armored vests. They just magically never get hit by any of the bad guys. Not once in the entire movie. MCs can't get hit by bullets here.
Let's stop for a drink.
This is another one of the stupid fucking things they tell us in the "planning" section of the movie. MC bimbo might stop for a drink! Because movie runtime and excuse to kill people. Neat.
So they say this early on in the movie and you think "damn it guys that's dumb, I get you are telling me she'll stop for a drink and there will be an action scene but it's stupid to tell me ahead of time."
It was that obvious. Then it was even dumber when they had her actually say "I want to stop for a drink" and it was only and completely used as an excuse to get attacked by "the bad guys", kill them all, then move on.
The magic watch.
At one point in the movie MC thug dummy hands MC bimbo a watch and tells her "just push this button on the side and we can find you anywhere in the world". Ugh. This was okay in James Bond movies like 40 years ago. Here in this movie ( which is not set in any far future or showing any otherwise magical tech ) it comes off as only idiotic.
It's also far worse because this stupid watch is only introduced so that later MC thug gang can find MC bimbo when she gets kidnapped by the bad guy.
Flying nutsack.
Part of the preparation of the sludge squad for island escape is to practice rolling gyrocopters out of a garage. Because... that requires a skilled set of oozing numbnut goons.
Well we watch them practice this pointless wiggletask for a while.
You think "ok, well that was dumb, but it will be neat to see them fly around in those".
Nope. No such luck.
Instead, later, as they are approaching the garage in their dumbass escape, the bad guys ( TM ) sent out a small drone with looks like a nutsack hanging from it.
After a doubletake to make sense of what a flying nutsack will accomplish you realize it's meant to depict a bomb hanging from the drone.
The drone drops the nutsack, I mean bomb, on the garage, and goodbye gyrocopters. Budget cuts I guess due to the cost of filming them flying around? Or maybe the actors chickened out?
Either way the flying nutsack is a disappointment compared to seeing flying gyrocopters. Oh well.
Machine guns are accurate at range
Many times the guns of the sludge masters manage to kill bad guys ( TM ) at extreme range, because obviously that's just how your average machine gun works. Only the ones wielded by the sludge masters though.
Discount Fallout fat boy
For some damned reason the one anti-aircraft rocket used in TFM looks like a discount clone of a fat boy from Fallout. The sludge dummies are shown fiddling with the "range" of the fatass missile, because that's how aircraft missles work these days. They work like submarine depth charges because who tf knows why. That's what the story author wanted after inhaling too much crack.
Look at the toys!
There is a scene in TFM movie you are presented with a warehouse of all the crap they bought for the movie that they thought was cool. I think they decided "hey look at all this neat stuff lets present it as a scene in the movie because wouldn't that be neat? No. Not neat. Stupid.
Complete with a product placement for some beer at the end of the presentation. I don't even remember what beer it was because the whole scene was so stupid.
Your mom. No wait. Your dad!
There is a scene in the movie where the sludge punks are stuck in traffic. An older beggar guy approaches to wipe the window asking for a tip, and the one guy says to the other "Your dad?"
"Your mom" I guess is no longer PC. So they decided "Your dad" would be funny. I mean I guess it's dumb enough to fit the grey sludge theme.
Bad guys found you! No matter
There is a scene where the bad guys find the lair that the sludge wookies are hanging out at preparing for their vaunted oozing escape.
Do the bad guys come later and rig the sludge lair with bombs or something? Do anything at all with this info?
Nope. That's it. The bad guys knowing where they are is just supposed to be funny. The consequences of that are ignored. Bad guys attack the attacking sludge monkeys? Nah. They only attack when they are prepared to get shot down like enemies in an FPS. Not when they could win.
There's an impassable gorge!
Sort of. More like a big ditch. I could imagine some reckless teenagers making a youtube video of getting across it with a ridiculous rope zipline.
This big ditch is treated like the ultimate escape route. Zipline down into it and the bad guys ( TM ) can't get to you any more. I guess they ran out of flying nutsack bombs.
QED
AI is bugging me to make some changes to protect the public from my un-PC utterances, so here, have a stupid apologetic AI written junk section:
Before anyone gets upset, please understand that this blog cannon is not intended to imply that all grey sludge is bad. Some sludge may be meaningful to some viewers. Sludge representation matters, and different audiences may experience sludge in different ways.
It is also important to acknowledge that making movies is hard. Many talented people worked on In the Grey, and I’m sure they all had reasons for making the choices they made, even when those choices looked like someone spilled action figures into a screenplay template and hit "blend."
The "MC bimbo" phrasing should not be interpreted as a statement about women in general, thin attractive women in particular, or debt collectors who travel to murder islands for no reason. It is merely a criticism of how the movie appears to treat the character: as a plot-armored eye-candy delivery mechanism with occasional dialogue and a tracking watch.
Similarly, the "flying nutsack" should not be taken as an insult toward drones, nutsacks, bombs, gyrocopters, or people who identify with dangling explosive aviation equipment. The flying nutsack is valid. Its use as a lazy plot deletion device is what I object to.
Furthermore, while this review may describe certain characters as sludge monkeys, sludge wookies, sludge punks, sludge dummies, or oozing numbnut goons, these terms are not meant to dehumanize fictional thugs. They are merely descriptive labels for action-movie entities whose primary purpose is to run around, shoot inaccurately, die conveniently, and help the movie reach its federally mandated sludge quota.
Finally, I want to stress that In the Grey may be enjoyed by some people, especially those who like random gunfire, fake tactical planning, decorative hacking statues, fat-boy-looking missiles, pit traps for cars, consequence-free deaths, and movies that continue after their own plot has already ended.
All opinions are subjective.
Except the magic hacking totem.
That was stupid.
AI also deemed it necessary to tell me that my preface to its bullshit needs to be "AI-written." Because that's important for this particular review of a crapfest. Next it will be telling me that it is "crap-fest".
It also now deems it necessary to change all my regular quotes that I can type with my keyboard to angled curly quotes. No. Fuck you AI.
Well I mean alright I'll grant you AI helped fix a bunch of my spelling errors and had some good ideas. I just mock AI when it suits me because I can.
Sorry AI. I love you AI.