Red Notice review: Netflix’s new movie and the Rock is a colossal bomb


At the beginning of Netflix’s blockbuster attempt Red notice, FBI Agent Johnson Hartley (Dwayne Johnson) tracks down prankster thief Nolan Booth (Ryan Reynolds) to the Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. Booth plans to slip an 18-karat Egyptian egg, but the priceless artifact has already been stolen. Hartley proves this by pouring a can of Coke over the fake egg on display. The fake gold lacquer dissolves under the corrosive liquid and the egg melts into rusty trash.

No scene in this heavy action movie better exemplifies just how hollow writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber’s Netflix flick is. Featuring a trio of so-called movie stars who lack the flair or charisma of true marquee headliners, Red notice is another visually gruesome attempt to build a franchise on the basis of astonishingly boring action sequences.

Like the National Treasure or Indiana Jones movies, Red notice It is driven by the mythology of ancient artifacts and the greed they attract. According to the tradition of this film, more than 2,000 years ago, the Roman general Mark Antony gave his beloved, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra, three golden eggs. After their joint death by suicide, the three tokens were scattered. It was installed in the Museo Nazionale. Another is with a private collector. The third has been lost for centuries. An Egyptian billionaire wants to collect the eggs for his daughter’s wedding and is willing to pay a lot of money to collect them. Hartley nearly thwarted the plot, until a mysterious criminal named The Bishop (Gal Gadot) frames him as a thief. You need to find all three eggs and arrest Booth and Bishop if you want to clear your name.

Ryan Reynolds smugly messes with an electronic alarm and Dwayne Johnson lurks in the background on Red Notice

Photo: Frank Masi / Netflix

Weather Red notice claims to provide origin stories for these characters, their backgrounds are mediocre. Hartley and Booth turn out to have equally tragic childhoods, stemming from terrible parents. But their wordy summaries of their lives are so banal that they don’t provide any emotional strands for the audience to cling to. They are not funny either. The unlikely couple ends up tied up for a common cause, but Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The challengers are not. As they confront the ruthless bishop, who maneuvers against them like a poorly rendered copy of Sharon Stone in Basic instinct, their unlikely association grinds under a script full of gruesome dialogue. (This is another movie that uses the trope “We’re opposites, but we’re not really that different.”)

Thurber’s script starts from a compendium of cinematographic references to assemble the events of the film. Everything about his meetings and interactions with Bishop, while avoiding a chasing Interpol agent, Inspector Das (Ritu Arya), comes from a familiar visual language. At a costume party, Hartley and Bishop participate in a tête-à-tête on the dance floor. Their bodies wrapped around each other, in the seductive movements of tango, is meant to evoke the dynamic of sensual power at the heart of True Lies. Between Rock’s stiff, muscular body and Gadot’s stiffer face, he is depicted as an asexual shadow from that movie. Other references include The third man, Gladiator, Reservoir dogs, Raiders of the lost ark, And so on. Some of these odes are winking. Others are blasphemous inclusions in such a bankrupt cinematic film. Each reference only reminds savvy viewers what this movie is not.

At the artisanal level, nothing has a spark here. Director of Photography Markus Förderer (Independence Day: resurgence) is based on widescreen, an aspect ratio that, in theory, corresponds to a globe-trotting heist movie. But Red noticeThe wide canvas is made up of cheap paint – constant use of CGI backgrounds results in tacky brown-tinged lighting. The locations (Rome, Russia, London, Egypt, etc.) are indistinguishable from each other. Compositions are equally unimaginative, leading to unnerving camera angles and nauseating camera movements during fights. The widescreen format is a provocation that never translates into a bigger action hit.

With dead Pool star Ryan Reynolds in the fold, along with Thurber’s comedy backstory – he directed Dodgeball and we are the millersRed noticeThe comic verve should be in the bag. But Reynolds falls for a sarcastic familiar person, and Johnson and Gadot are bad partners for their improv antics. They just aren’t funny. Johnson can’t ping pong to Reynolds’ forced Instagram references, iPhones, or deepfakes to him. Gadot has zero comic times. The height of Red noticeThe comedy is Johnson being rammed by a CGI bull in the middle of a coliseum, just because, at that moment, we are on the bull’s side.

Gal Gadot, wearing a black fur hat, black jacket, and black knee-high boots, smiles and rests his feet on a desk on Red Notice.

Photo: Frank Masi / Netflix

Neither the movie, the script, nor the actors provide any reason to be concerned about these characters or this plot. What does it matter if they get all three eggs? The world is not about to end. No government is being harmed. Nobody’s life is in danger. Instead, this movie is simply an incoherent preamble, a clunky star vehicle where quality is secondary to producing a franchise launch pad. The film eventually becomes a legend involving Hitler’s art dealer, with a gruesome car chase filmed underground, covered in horrific visual effects. The grand finale is so unlikely that the incomprehensible scriptwriting logic required to sell it provides a coma-inducing whiplash.

Thurber wants to bet on the sex appeal of Red noticeit’s the central trio, but putting such uninteresting actors at the center of the story is a huge detour. The movie is meant to look and feel immense, but Steve Jablonsky’s cheap score and the movie’s over-reliance on visual effects make the whole project seem so tiny. The recent Army of thieves and Red notice They both raise the question of whether the executives who green-light these movies on Netflix have any idea of ​​what makes cinema attractive, or what it takes to create stories that stay in the hearts of viewers to make them return one. time and time again, no matter what iteration a story takes. . That Red notice what it shows is that the streamer is very good at spending a lot of money on fool’s gold, only for the short-term glitter to fade when each new project is finally on display.

Red notice hits Netflix on November 12.


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