RED NOTICE Offers Too Few Pleasures and One Too Many Missteps
A disposable action-comedy
Note to current and prospective filmmakers: If somehow, somewhere, someone hands over roughly $200M (including top-line salaries for a movie star trio) to make the latest, greatest blockbuster wannabe, it’s probably a good idea to put a little effort into making your film look like it wasn’t shot on green screen and your stars haphazardly pasted into various and sundry scenes. Unfortunately, that simple, basic lesson seems to have completely escaped writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber’s (Skyscraper, Central Intelligence, We’re the Millers) latest big-budget misstep, Red Notice, a turgid, flaccid, disposable action-comedy that will come and go before the weekend’s out with nary a lasting image left behind. Red Notice also represents Thurber’s third, possibly final film with the World’s Busiest Movie Star™, Dwayne “Formerly the Rock” Johnson.
Painfully overstuffed with over-directed, physics-and logic-defying, CGI-heavy action scenes, periodic cuts to co-star Ryan Reynolds (the Once and Future Wade Wilson/Deadpool), channeling his smug, self-satisfied quipster for the 357th time in a career seemingly spanning decades, and a passive, recessive performance by Gal Gadot filling in time between Wonder Woman sequels, Red Notice centers on Johnson’s character, Very Special FBI Agent, John Hartley, Hartley’s chief quarry, Reynold’s Nolan Booth, an international art thief of some renown sandbagged by Daddy Issues, and the enigmatic Bishop (Gadot), a full-time international art thief like Nolan, but also a part-time master manipulator and occasional puppeteer.
After an opening scene set in Rome where Booth steals one of three, millennia-old bejeweled eggs apparently created by Marc Antony for Cleopatra as a wedding present (spoiler: They died), with Hartley and Interpol agents led by Inspector Urvashi Das (Ritu Arya), through, in, and around a museum, Red Notice makes the first of countless, globe-trotting jumps as Hartley and Das catch up with Booth at his seaside sanctuary in Rome. One set-up/betrayal later and Hartley finds himself in a maximum-security prison somewhere in Russia with none other than Booth as his over-sharing, perpetually quipping roommate, confidante, and as expected, reluctant friend or pseudo-friend. That, in turn, leads to another protracted action scene filmed primarily on a smallish, green-screened soundstage, each shot as artificial looking as the last.
With constant, ever-shifting, criss-crossing stops around the world (mostly Europe), Red Notice is nothing if not frenetically paced. All that action, though, hides an incredibly hollow core, from the supremely tired bromance between Hartley (always the befuddled, frustrated straight man) and Booth (always the annoying, impulsive comedian) working their way through one cliched scenario after another. It ultimately leads to a prolonged attempt to steal the second egg at the home of a diminutive, black-market arms dealer with a penchant for manual strangulation, Sotto Voce (Chris Diamantopoulos), and the not unexpected return of Bishop, just as mysterious and inscrutable as before, her agenda, if not quite hidden, then vaguely defined and indifferently motivated.
Stunt performers excepted, no one associated with Red Notice works particularly hard to sell Thurber’s unoriginal, derivative screenplay. By the time the not-quite-terrible trio arrives at their final destination somewhere in South America (insert reference to Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark here, less homage than straight-up rip-off), a general sense of boredom has swept through both the proceedings and the respective performances. Johnson, Reynolds, and Gadot are pros, of course, meaning they say their lines and hit their marks, but it’s just as obvious they’ve long ago realized they attached themselves and their respective brands to a bloated, over-expensive failure that they, like everyone else on the other side of the screen, will likely soon forgot, if not outright remove from their CVs.
Red Notice can be streamed on Netflix.
