Netflix’s ‘The Gray Man’ Proved I Can’t Watch Gun Violence Action Movies Anymore

There’s a sequence in The Gray Man, Netflix’s star-studded action thriller that releases on the streaming service this Friday, that is essentially 20 minutes of uninterrupted gun violence. Ryan Gosling—a former CIA assassin—is hand-cuffed to a public bench, and Chris Evans—the sociopathic hit man the CIA hired to get rid of Gosling—has every morally ambiguous man with a gun in the area open firing. Bazookas, handguns, automatic rifles. Big guns, small guns, guns propped up on rocks.

Up until this scene, I’d been having fun. I had fun watching Gosling beat up dudes in a warehouse full of exploding fireworks and in an airplane plummeting from the sky. I had fun watching Ana de Armas in a floral power suit and Evans in so-called trash ‘stache. But as the bullets continued to rain down, as the extras on screen screamed and ran for their life, as Evans yelled for more guns—I couldn’t bring myself to have fun. I was too distracted by a prick of anxiety, starting low in my gut and moving up into my chest.

Because, after a few minutes of watching gunmen open fire in a public square in Prague, my mind was no longer with the movie. I wasn’t thinking about how Ryan Gosling was going to get out of this one; I was thinking about the nearest exit in my own movie theater, and how I would walk, not run in the case of an active shooter emergency. I was thinking about the crowd of sparkly young queer folks fleeing for their lives at NYC Pride because, for all they knew, that stray firework was a mass shooter. I was thinking about the angry man who was shouting and slapping the seat on my subway ride over, and how I made fearful eye contact with my fellow passengers as we gave him space, knowing we were thinking the same thing: What if he has a gun?

I was thinking about elementary school students crouched under desks while they watch their classmates and teachers hit the floor in Uvalde, Texas. I was thinking about the shoppers who thought they were performing a mundane chore in Buffalo, New York. I was thinking of the families who went out to watch a 4th of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois. I was thinking of the countless victims of mass shootings—past, present, and future—which seem to have become an inevitability in my lifetime.

Needless to say, it was a bit of a buzzkill.

Call it a vibe shift or call it PTSD, but I didn’t use to be this way. I’ve consumed Quentin Tarantino movies without blinking an eye. I saw Skyfall in theaters three times and loved every gun-filled minute of it. But over the last decade, something has changed in me as an audience member. My tolerance for Hollywood bullets has slowly waned, with every new shooting headline pushing it a little bit lower. I went from half-heartedly going along with the hype for the excessively violent Kingsman: The Secret Service in 2015, to walking out on The Golden Circle in 2017, to refusing to entertain the idea of watching The King’s Man in 2021. (It certainly didn’t help when a clip from the first movie went viral, after being re-edited to portray Donald Trump violently gunning down reporters.) I’d been looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s TENET until I saw an IMAX promo depicting a hyper-realistic gun-wielding terrorist attack at an opera house. From then on, I dreaded it.

But something about that shoot-out scene in The Gray Man broke me. Maybe it was the sheer excess of firearms. (It was hard not to see the parallels between Evans’ character, who throws more and more guns at his problems, and directors Joe and Anthony Russo, who threw so much money at The Gray Man script that it became Netflix’s most expensive film to date.) Or maybe it was the proximity to the shooting at Robb Elementary, the third-deadliest school shooting in the United States, with new hideous details emerging in the news every day. Or maybe it was the duration of the scene, which felt endless in my growing discomfort.

To be clear, I don’t think anyone who watches The Gray Man on Netflix is going to go shoot up a square because they think Ryan Gosling looked cool with a handgun. Does Hollywood glorify gun violence? Absolutely! It also glorifies giant lizard monsters and drunk-dialing your ex. I’m ambivalent about the attitude, for example, that led to a recent open letter, signed by celebrities like Shonda Rhimes and Julianne Moore, calling on Hollywood to tone down the gun glamorization the same way it toned down cigarette smoking. Until Congress passes significant gun control laws—which, given the recent Supreme Court decision upending regulations on concealed carry of firearms in public space, doesn’t seem likely to happen any time soon—it seems doubtful that Hollywood movies will have much effect on gun violence in the U.S.

I’m not calling for excessive gun violence in action movies to go away—at least, not because I think it will have any effect on real-world mass shootings.  I’m simply saying that I can’t watch these movies anymore. It doesn’t feel like thrill-seeking escapism. It feels like peering into a crystal ball of future trauma; like seeing an all-too-real horrific vision that seems increasingly likely to happen to me or a loved one someday.

Maybe I’m the only one feeling this way. But I have a feeling I’m not. The last decade of the American mass shooting epidemic does not exist in a void. If Hollywood is meant to reflect the cultural zeitgeist, then screenwriters may want to consider this: More and more, guns just don’t feel fun.