In the opening credits of “Red Notice,” we see a 3D printed fabrication of an artefact foreshadowing that the latest collaboration between filmmaker Rawson Marshall Thurber and Dwayne Johnson is nothing but the most egregious attempted forgery.
Master thief Nolan Booth (Ryan Reynolds) attempts an elaborate and lucrative, daring series of three heists to reassemble a fabled wedding gift from Marc Anthony to Cleopatra. However, when rogue FBI agent John Hartley (Johnson) is framed by Booth’s competition The Bishop (Gal Gadot), Booth and Hartley must work together to retrieve the artefacts, clear his name and take down the Bishop.
“Red Notice” is just a truly inferior, confined, sorry excuse for streaming “blockbuster” entertainment. Even though there are moments for action (the film’s opening scene sees Booth parkour-ing through a museum under construction in order to escape), almost every action location reeks of green screen artificiality.
There is more care taken to crowbar in product placements for Reynolds and Johnson’s alcohol brands than for any other kind of direction or composition in the film.
It’s not helped that Johnson is woefully miscast as John Hartley. Johnson’s size is the butt of many of Reynolds’ rapid-fire teases, but it is unexplained for the whole film. To honestly suspend our disbelief, there needs to be at least one moment where he is doing a push-up.
Something, ANYTHING, to say that this insanely muscular human being did not just wake up like this. Take a lesson from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Harry in “True Lies” which perfectly handles the inherent fun of a burly, rough and tumble action star posing as a boring computer salesman.
Gadot, in almost every role that isn’t Wonder Woman, is distractingly bad. There’s a kind of smugness without calculation that consistently holds you at arm’s length. Apart from Patty Jenkins creating the conditions for romantic and sexual energy to spark between Gadot and co-star Chris Pine, it’s found nowhere else in her work. There are scenes here where her character is meant to wield some sort of bewitching sexual power, but she may as well be a cyborg.
The only thing going for it is that “Red Notice” uses Reynolds’ Booth as the constant conscience for the movie. Thurber wields Reynolds as this self-deprecating part character/part colour commentator that steadily takes the piss out of Johnson, Gadot, and all the intertextual references or contrivances.
Reynolds is back to third-wheeling this flushable Netflix original in the autopilot that he endured for all the seasons of “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place”. The thing is, Reynolds looks exhausted. Is it his many lucrative entrepreneurial endeavours? Is it fatherhood? Is it a hectic movie production and promo cycle?
Perhaps all of those things. However, I’d wager that part of what’s making him look more bored than he has with himself at any point in his career conveys that all of this immense effort is for naught.
There’s almost nothing that infuriates me more than the recent trend of location chevrons in movies shouting at you in ALL CAPS at the latest locations. Particularly in Marvel films, this trend of shouting the transition to a new location has grated me on every viewing.
In “Red Notice,” this screeching stupidity has hit a fever pitch. Not only does every new location smash you in the face, but what’s more offensive is that on many occasions during this ‘globetrotting’ adventure, you are quite positive that the audience and the filmmakers are not travelling to the locations that the chevrons exclaim.
Instead, it calls attention to the joy of classic James Bond films and the like that actually go to recognisable places around the globe and don’t require a specific text shout out – as opposed to the offensively bad and wholly augmented digitally rendered experience of the world here.
In terms of authenticity, “Red Notice” isn’t even a passable fake.
