Red Notice is the long-delayed collaboration between Ryan Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot; though it would have benefitted from never being released at all. The film is a derivative and ugly mess, trying to balance a fast pace and thoughtful twists while never achieving either goal.
It’s boring, doesn’t bring anything new to the table for either genre it’s trying to be and ultimately falls flat in about every conceivable way. It’s not worth the two hours of your time it takes to view, though I would go as far as to say it’s not even worth a second of it.
The film follows Special Agent John Hartley (Dwayne Johnson) as he’s forced to work together with a world-renowned art thief, Nolan Booth (Ryan Reynolds), to catch The Bishop (Gal Gadot), the world’s best con-woman and thief. In order to do that, they must collect the three eggs of Cleopatra before The Bishop can. I wish I could say there’s more to it, but that’s really all the plot there is.
Director and writer Rawson Marshall Thurber helmed what is possibly the worst film of the year. While it may be mostly competently made, at least for the most part, it’s aggressively dull and unmemorable, which I would argue is worse than if it was just straight-up awful.
When a film is awful, at least there’s something to latch on to and maybe even laugh at but there’s none of that here. I’ve seen some on Twitter say the film resembles a fake movie playing in the background of a real one, something I wholeheartedly agree with. At the same time, that statement would be an insult to Angels with Filthy Souls from Home Alone.
Nothing about the film works, especially its constant attempts at comedy. Reynolds throws quips out so frequently that you’d think he was still playing Deadpool and not an art thief, but almost all of them fall flat. Johnson also tries to be funny, but it never works. Thankfully Gadot doesn’t attempt any comedy, at least intentionally. Her acting is so egregiously bad that it’s probably the funniest thing in this action-comedy.
For Red Notice being an action film, first and foremost, the action is terribly shot and edited together and excruciatingly boring to watch; shaky cam and extremely fast cuts are used extensively, which make some scenes unintelligible.
One scene, taking place on scaffolding at the beginning of the film, stands out as one of the worst I’ve seen in years. It’s impossible to track what’s going on, what the focus of the shots is and where the camera is in relation to what’s going on. I can’t fathom why a scene like this needs as many cuts as it does in the minute or two it takes up in the film.
Despite the cast being made up of the A-lists of the A-list, it seems like none of them really want to be there despite their reported paychecks of at least $20 million each. It seems like they’re all on autopilot, knowing the well below-average quality of the material.
Johnson’s disinterest throughout the film feels even weirder due to him being a producer. Obviously, they all give pretty terrible performances, which may be the worst of all of their respective careers (and that’s really saying something for Gadot).
The film’s budget of $200 million is extremely surprising as it looks worse than pretty much every other blockbuster released this year, being visually upstaged by other Netflix films as well, like Army of Thieves (which is a masterpiece in comparison).
Red Notice is a consistently ugly film, mostly due to its massive overuse of bad CGI, which always looks like leftovers from Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. The production was required to film the majority of its globetrotting adventure in Atlanta, so the computer effects and green screens were required to attempt to sell the film being set anywhere other than Georgia.
I wish I could say there was something even somewhat redeemable about Red Notice, but there’s nothing of the sort to be found. If you’re looking for a fun film to watch or even have on in the background, look elsewhere.
It’s a shame that a film with so much talent and money behind it isn’t better than it ended up being, but that’s often the case nowadays. There’s no reason for this film to exist, but at least the crew got paid for their work on it — that’s the best thing that can be said about it.
