Red Notice Review: Netflix’s Dwayne Johnson Movie Is As Bad As Blockbusters Can Get

This review by Red notice originally ran in conjunction with the film’s theatrical release. It has been updated and republished for the movie’s Netflix streaming debut on November 12th.

At the start of Netflix’s attempted blockbuster robbery Red notice, FBI agent Johnson Hartley (Dwayne Johnson) pursues the pointless thief Nolan Booth (Ryan Reynolds) to the Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. Booth plans to steal an 18-karat Egyptian egg, but the priceless artifact has already been stolen. Hartley proves it by pouring a can of Coke over the fake egg on display. The fake gold lacquer dissolves under the caustic liquid and the egg melts into rusted garbage.

No scene in this lumbering action film better illustrates the hollowness of writer and director Rawson Marshall Thurber’s Netflix movie. With a trio of supposed movie stars who lack the vigor or charisma of real marquee headliners, Red notice is yet another visually gruesome attempt at building a franchise based on action sequences that commit a cardinal sin for blockbuster thrillers. The sequences that are supposed to convey tension here are not only strangely cheap and ugly, but also breathtakingly boring.

Like the films National Treasure or Indiana Jones Red notice is fueled by the mythology of ancient artifacts and the greed they attract. According to the lore of this film, the Roman general Mark Antony gave three golden eggs to his mistress, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, more than 2,000 years ago. After they died together by suicide, the three tokens were scattered. One settled in the Museo Nazionale. Another is with a private collector. The third one has been missing for centuries. An Egyptian billionaire wants to reunite the eggs for his daughter’s wedding and is willing to pay big bucks to bring them together. Hartley nearly foils the plot until he is caught as a thief by a mysterious criminal named The Bishop (Gal Gadot). He has to find the three eggs and arrest Booth and Bishop if he wants to clear his name.

While Red notice is supposed to provide origin stories for these characters, their backgrounds are lackluster. It turns out that Hartley and Booth share a similarly tragic childhood that stems from terrible fathers. But their lengthy life summaries are so mundane that they fail to provide emotional branches for audiences to cling to. They’re not funny either. The unlikely couple ends up on a common cause, but Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier are in The defiant You are not. When they face the unscrupulous bishop who maneuvers against them as a poorly reproduced copy of Sharon Stone Primal instinct, their unlikely partnership collapses under a script full of terrible dialogue. (This is another film that uses the trope, “We are opposites, but we are actually not that different”.)

Thurber’s script cribs from a compendium of cinematic references to compose the events of the film. Everything about her meetings and interactions with Bishop while avoiding the chasing Interpol agent Inspector Das (Ritu Arya) comes from a familiar imagery. At a masquerade party, Hartley and Bishop throw a tte-à-tête on the dance floor. Their bodies, wrapped around each other in the seductive movements of tango, are intended to stimulate the sensual force dynamics in the heart of. evoke True Lies. Between the stiff, muscular body of the skirt and the stiffer face of Gadot, it is rendered as the asexual shadow of this film. Further references are The third man, gladiator, Reservoir Dogs, Hunter of the lost treasure, and so forth. Some of these odes blink. Others are blasphemous inclusions in such a cinematic bankrupt film. Each reference only reminds savvy viewers what this film is not.

At the technical level, nothing has a spark here. Cinematographer Markus Förderer (Independence Day: Resurgence) relies on widescreen, an aspect ratio that theoretically corresponds to a global robbery. but Red noticeThe wide canvas is made of cheap paint: the constant use of CGI wallpapers results in vulgar brown lighting. The locations – Rome, Russia, London, Egypt, etc. – are indistinguishable from each other. The compositions, which lead to confusing camera perspectives and disgusting camera movements during fights, are just as unimaginative. The widescreen format is an eye-catcher that never leads to a larger radius of action.

With Dead Pool Star Ryan Reynolds along with Thurber’s comedy background – he directed Dodgeball and We are the millers – Red noticeThe comedic swing should be in your pocket. But Reynolds falls into a familiar sarcasm persona, and Johnson and Gadot are bad partners for his improvisational antics. They are just not funny. Johnson can’t ping Reynolds’ strained references on Instagram, iPhones, or deepfakes back to him. Gadot doesn’t have weird timing. The amount of Red noticeThe comedy is that Johnson gets rammed by a CGI cop in the middle of a Coliseum just because we’re on the bull’s side at that point.

Neither the film, the script, nor the actors give cause to care about these characters or this plot. What does it matter if they reach all three eggs? The world is not over. No governments are hurt. Nobody’s life is in danger. Instead, this film is just an incoherent preamble, a jalopy star vehicle where quality is secondary to producing a franchise launch pad. The film eventually winds into a legend of Hitler’s art dealer, with a terribly twisted underground car chase littered with hideous visual effects. The grand finale is so unlikely that the incomprehensible script logic necessary to sell it causes coma-inducing whiplash.

Thurber wants to focus on sex appeal Red notice‘s central trio, but putting such uninteresting actors at the center of the story is a huge distraction. The movie is supposed to look and feel huge, but Steve Jablonsky’s cheap score and the movie’s over-reliance on visual effects make the whole project look oh-so-tiny. The recent one Army of thieves and Red notice Both raise the question of whether the executives who released these films on Netflix have any idea what makes a captivating tentpole movie theater or what it takes to create stories that will stick in the hearts of viewers for them to do keep coming back no matter what iteration a story takes. What Red notice proves the streamer is very good at spending big bucks on fool’s gold only to have the short-term glitz go away when each new project is finally on display.

Red notice debuted in theaters on November 5 and is now streamed on Netflix.