THB # 187: The Gray Man

could someone turn on a light?

The Russo Brothers have boxed themselves in.

They mastered a form for Marvel that worked rather brilliantly for Marvel. Their Infinity War/Endgame combo of Avengers movies met a very high bar of making a coherent, exciting, emotional 5.5 hour story out of a decade of Marvel stories that never before connected in quite that way.

But here is the problem… the magic trick they pulled off was particular to that piece of material or, I am guessing, other pieces of material in which the characters are deeply established before the movie that closes out a much longer story.

What I have seen in Cherry - the brothers’ first post-Marvel film for AppleTV+ - as well as in Netflix’s new The Gray Man is that they have an intense desire to use every tool they have developed at Marvel on these stories that are not pre-established nearly well enough to handle this set of tools.

Cherry, the better of their 2 post-Marvel movie, is the tale of a young man who becomes a lover, a …