Review: Red Notice Is Sludge Waiting to Be Compartmentalized by the Netflix Algorithm

Red Notice is a lifeless pastiche of various blockbuster action-movie styles from the past four decades.

Red Notice
Photo: Netflix

Rawson Marshall Thurber’s Red Notice is the cinematic equivalent of a blandly competent cover band cranking out perfunctory versions of hits you know by heart. With sequences lifted wholesale from everything from Face/Off to The Thomas Crown Affair, the film is so bereft of original ideas that it almost starts to play as a winking genre mashup, something like what Kill Bill might look like if Quentin Tarantino was more into Jerry Bruckheimer and Steven Spielberg than Sergio Corbucci and the Shaw Brothers.

During a scene that cribs from Raiders of the Lost Ark, one character starts whistling the Indiana Jones theme music. It’s a nod to the audience that the filmmakers know how obvious their genre-thieving is, but such gestures come off less as gleeful winks than resigned shrugs. And despite its massive budget, top-tier stars, and state-of-the-art special effects, Red Notice aspires to be nothing more than flavorless sludge to be compacted and compartmentalized by Netflix’s marketing algorithms. It can be sold, variously, as a buddy action-comedy for those who enjoyed the Lethal Weapon series, a heist thriller with a strong female lead, or a rollicking National Treasure-style adventure. It’s all of these things and none of them at the same time, an assemblage of borrowed parts that never integrate into a coherent whole.

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Dwayne Johnson stars as hotshot F.B.I. profiler John Hartley, who’s working the international art-heist beat, chasing after dueling thieves Nolan Booth (Ryan Reynolds) and a shadowy operative known only as the Bishop (Gal Gadot). Booth and the Bishop are seeking three ancient bejeweled eggs, gifts from Mark Antony to Cleopatra, which have been scattered across the globe over the intervening centuries. An Egyptian billionaire, Abanoub Magdy (Ethan Herschenfeld), has offered up a handsome sum to anyone who can deliver all three eggs, which are to be given to his daughter, also named Cleopatra (Brenna Marie Narayan), as a wedding gift. Globetrotting hijinks ensue, taking the central trio to a Roman museum, a Russian prison, a Spanish villa, an abandoned Argentine copper mine, and beyond.

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When Hartley’s accused of stealing one of the eggs by Interpol, he’s forced to team up with the wisecracking Booth in a “marriage of convenience” that finds them busting each other’s chops and double-crossing each other at every turn. There’s a Hope-and-Crosby “Road” picture begging to burst forth from the film’s three-way character dynamic, with Reynolds filling the wiseass Hope role, Johnson as the Crosby-like straight man, and Gadot as an ass-kicking update on Dorothy Lamour’s typically thankless romantic-interest part. But despite the film’s prodigious ball-busting repartee, the three leads never really ease into a groove.

Reynolds’s rote smart-aleck schtick grows increasingly strained as the film wears on, while Johnson’s surprisingly dour performance is uncharacteristically charmless with his usual twinkling charisma apparent only in the film’s final stretch. Gadot chews her scenes with relish, but her character is too ill-defined to provide much for her to sink her teeth into.

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Unlike the “Road” films, whose threadbare plots ambled along with no hint of urgency, making plenty of time for a song-and-dance number here and some improv-heavy riffing there, Thurber’s script is fixated on keeping things moving. Our characters have scarcely arrived in some new exotic locale before some loopy plot complication or gratuitous action sequence has thrust them along to the next. The film, then, goes down easy enough. It may not be clever or original, but at least it doles out amusingly asinine plot twists with clockwork-like regularity.

Red Notice rarely goes more than 20 minutes without some explosion, foot chase, or a little hand-to-hand combat, but all this action feels as mechanical and uninspired as the rest of its moving parts. Scenes that should simmer with gonzo energy, such as a prison escape that devolves into a miniature military battle in which a missile flies through the open doors of a helicopter, simply coast on by, barely leaving an impact on the viewer. Thurber at least has a penchant for digitally-assisted effects in which the camera appears to dart through windows and dive off cliffs, which lend these otherwise blandly utilitarian action sequences a sense of dynamism. But therein lies the film’s fundamental problem: A constant sense of motion can’t obscure how stale, secondhand, and spiritless this entire endeavor feels.

Score: 
 Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, Gal Gadot, Ritu Arya, Chris Diamantopoulos, Ivan Mbakop, Vincenzo Amato, Ethan Herschenfeld  Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber  Screenwriter: Rawson Marshall Thurber  Distributor: Netflix

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

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