The mindless destruction might have been bearable if The Gray Man had been a comedy – and there are times when it almost is. The characters always have smarmy comebacks at the ready (although they're witty without being funny), the ever-cool Gosling raises a smile by treating the violence as a mildly irritating inconvenience, and Evans is entertainingly horrible as a sadistic sociopath. But this knockabout nonsense is interspersed with upsetting torture scenes, and numerous shots of a child being terrified by all the carnage around her. The Russos clearly couldn't decide which tone to go for, so they made a zany farce about cheerful super-spies, and then they made a cynical conspiracy drama about death and trauma, and they kept cutting between them.
