I arrived at In The Grey late, by about 10 minutes.
AMC usually rolls out about half an hour’s worth of trailers before showtime so I thought I was safe, but I wasn’t, I arrived in the darkness in the middle of a famous Guy Ritchie montage, complete with fancy captions on the screen in yellow. It’s been a very very long time since I’ve been in a theatre that was packed. This wasn’t a packed theatre. The rows which are considered to be good rows were filled, the red seats were stuffed with people and some of them had already finished their snacks. Everything else was empty and I took one of the emptier seats in the emptier lateral rows.
Guy Ritchie almost didn’t make Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. He ran out of money while making it. The entire thing was a very independent thing. The color-grading and overall film quality was great. Greys, browns, grainy, and it was a very sharp re-interpretation of the witty chorus-like dialogue of Performance. Pre 2000s. Pre 9/11. When I turned 14, at my own request, my mom took me to the theatres to see Snatch for my birthday. I was a little young for it, and a little slow, but already had been absorbing action and crime films since my introduction to Pulp Fiction at 9 years old. I just wanted the coolness to wash over me.
Jason Statham was slim, and called Bacon in Lock Stock, and my sister and I took turns reciting his opening monologue, his street-speech as he’s selling counterfeit items before being chased by the cops in the title sequence. In The Transporter he drank Orangina, and then spent the latter part of his career mostly hitting people with hammers and looking really cool driving cars, fighting.
The other Ritchie movies, while entertaining, seem to replicate what he’s good at, what was mastered in his most successful earlier pictures. The montage, the chorus, more recently the tailoring, the machismo, the clever twist. Over and over again. I’m not complaining, I can sit in the theatre and dissociate and come back to the surface when there's a particularly pointed joke.
He makes movies that will make money, there will always be a group of 18-31 year old men who want to embody the cool, post-GQ, H&M menswear and come up with a plan. Any kind of plan. At screening number one, because as I said, I was late, most of the jokes were laughed at. It was an earlier showing and thus a slightly more mature crowd, who could still read books and had the disposable time and income to attend a mid-week matinee. I have no problems with the casting, but it is markedly different hearing English wit on modern American tongues as opposed to a British one.
Maybe it’s the tone or the timing, or the rhythm, the poetry wasn’t there. It was hard. Lots of pecs and biceps fought for screen time through rayon-polyster button-downs. While there was no gratuitous T&A, the mastermind attorney at the heart of the plot is clever, but has no agency for herself. She risks her own life for other people and ultimately gets screwed initially, and there isn’t enough of a backstory as to the loyalty earned for her two faithful mercenary pups. An older actress would fill in those details thematically, and you know what, I lied. I do have problems with the casting, it should have been Rosamund Pike as the attorney, she would have been more believable. Whatever, you can’t get what you want.
Shut up and enjoy the free movie.
I missed the beginning, so after it was over, I wandered back upstairs, went outside to breathe some fresh polluted Los Angeles air, and booked another screening on my phone. I went back inside about 30 minutes later, and the same guy scanned me in. This time I ordered chicken tenders. When they come out of the cardboard box they are hard, very very hard and salty and crunchy. Eating them in the dark is sinful delight. I went into the theatre shortly after they finished cleaning it from a previous showing. I wanted to be as alone as possible. Nothing was on the screen yet, not even ads. I reclined, and kept my sunglasses on and crunched into the first hard chicken piece. Someone else was there, I’d seen him sleeping in theatres before. He popped his head up, but my glasses shielded me. Another person was behind me a few rows back scrolling on his phone. We all knew not to bother one another nor talk.
I finished eating by the time the first set of ads rolled in. Some broccoli heads wandered in and took seats in the center back row. Target audience acquired. They were noisy and the sleeping man sat up several times to move as well as look back at them. There was too much salt in the batter and my chest was getting tight. I drank several sips of water, what did it matter, I would only need to see the top portion. You always have to watch Guy Ritchie movies twice anyway. As the team perfectly executed their well-dressed plan for extraction, as a perfect one-off dress rehearsal, I too watched the pieces fall perfectly into place, just as they’d been explained the first time. It went down smooth, and I was pleased at the action which made up for any lingering plot holes or incongruences. If you adjust your expectations for a lot of things in life, you too can have a rather pleasant and mild afternoon, even if that includes watching someone make military-level fantasy scenarios look sexy and you’re of peak recruitment age. The broccoli heads didn’t laugh at any of the jokes, and I am old. Still, I think we all had a pretty good time.
