Red Notice (2021).
“All’s fair in love and eggs.”
Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber
Written by Rawson Marshall Thurber
Starring Ryan Reynolds, The Rock, Wonder Woman, the camera guy from The Office, and some eggs
The Stage.
Okay, here we go…when an art thief sets up another art thief and the FBI agent looking for both of them, they bond over their shitty dads and become best friends. Oh, and also there are some big eggs involved.
The Review.
On paper, Red Notice seems like a movie I should love. I love The Rock. I love Ryan Reynolds. I don’t dislike Gal Gadot. A treasure hunting, globe hopping adventure film with wisecracking protagonists, big set pieces, and a whole lot of fun. It sounded like Oceans 11 meets Indiana Jones. And to be fair, it has most of that. People are making dick jokes while making daring escapes from Russian gulags and having comedic arguments while driving through an abandoned mineshaft. Unfortunately, what it lacks is the fun.
Obviously, I like movies that are big, dumb, and loud, but they’ve got to have heart or some emotion to them. It’s the reason why I love 1995’s Bad Boys so much. How can a movie with this kind of on-screen talent feel so vapid and soulless? The Rock normally oozes this bizarre asexual charisma while playing the exact same character in every movie he’s in, but he’s almost always fun to watch. By now, you should know exactly what you’re getting when you watch Ryan Reynolds, since outside of Voices and Mississippi Grind, he’s essentially been Berg from Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place while just changing jobs and hairdos for each role, but again, he’s almost always fun to watch. Then there’s Gal Gadot, who has doesn’t have any charisma, but looks nice in a dress. She got paid twenty-million dollars to put her name on the poster and play a slightly more cheerful, edgy version of Diana from Wonder Woman. No one here looks like they want to be here, and I think that’s the big problem with this film. The charisma that we’re used to seeing from the male leads is mysteriously missing, and you can’t force that. It feels like we’re watching robots from Westworld before they knew they could do cool shit on their own. When you have The Rock and Ryan Reynolds sharing so much screen time and an Ed Sheeran cameo is the funniest thing about your movie, it’s a problem.
Another problem is that with a budget of $200 million, how did the action feel this stale? There’s nothing new here and the stuff you’ve seen before wasn’t done better. Parkour scenes, car chases, shoot outs, foot chases, they all feel so bland. There’s one scene late in the movie that sees our characters and the police racing through an abandoned mine shaft and I just felt bored. On that note, how could the CGI look this bad? There’s a scene that features a bull that looks absurd, like Escape From L.A., how to make computer graphics on this $300 budget laptop YouTube tutorial level CGI.
The End.
I wanted to turn the movie off after 20 minutes and it never got better. In post-release promotional Instagram posts, The Rock ignores the critics and looks to the Rotten Tomatoes +90% audience score (an audience filled with people who benefited from a second telling of an early plot point being described, in detail, just minutes after we’d heard about it the first time, just in case you were too stupid to pick it up initially), but this movie is bad, and not in a ‘so bad it’s good’ kind of way. This is just forgettable bad, and with a $200 million price tag, it rounds the corner from boring to infuriating.
Never once did I care about any of the characters or the stupid eggs they were looking for. The end of the film sets us up for a sequel, which of course we could all see coming as I don’t think there’s one death in the movie. Any time something explodes, people dive out of the way just in time to avoid being charred like my inevitable attempt at a deep fried Thanksgiving turkey ala G.I. Joe. This is an attempt by the filmmakers to avoid making your brain say, “Wait, I can’t like these people anymore because they murdered an Interpol agent over a golden fucking egg.”, not realizing that your brain is already thinking, “I don’t like these people because they’re just plain unlikable.” I think it goes without saying that I could not care less about a sequel.
