Red Notice is less a movie than Netflix’s most financially-extravagant expression of its corporate strategy. One senses that instead of a script, the filmmakers worked off a binder containing reams of Netflix data and instead of storyboards there were pie charts. The resulting twisty, snarky, glossy, fast-moving, globe-trotting, empty suit of a heist comedy ticks every conceivable box so every Netflix viewer will find something they like: fist fights, gun fights, car chases, narrow escapes, Egyptian artifacts, exotic locales, stolen loot, Nazis, double crosses, fancy cars, bullfights, fancy clothes and three actual movie stars. In that limited context Red Notice works because it’s engineered to work, like one of those enormous, lumbering machines they use to bore subway tunnels. What the movie fails to provide is a way to really connect with it: missing in the rubble are charm, insouciance, originality and the frisson of joy one feels upon discovering something new (see: Squid Game).
Red Notice is Netflix’s most expensive film to date, upwards of $200M by some reports, which proves that the streamer is still trying to buy a solution to its biggest problem: a lack of in-house IP. When studios like Disney and Paramount began pulling their most valued films and TV series from Netflix in preparation for their own pay services, the streamer was left with no big-ticket original content that can be spun-off and sequelized. They’ve been trying to rectify that in recent years with Enola Holmes, The Old Guard, Army of the Dead and Extraction all getting sequels.
Red Notice’s best argument for a follow-up is stars Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Godot. Thanks in no small part to them, Netflix claimed the film scored the streamer’s “biggest opening day in history” which is aggravating and meaningless nonsense since Netflix doesn’t release viewership data, so they can massage the numbers any way they want and shout their little white lies from the rooftop. That said, The Rock, Deadpool and Wonder Woman are serious draws so sky high numbers are possible. The bad news is that even if Red Notice really is a smash, Lord knows in what century those three will have simultaneous months-long holes in their schedules to film a sequel.
So for the foreseeable future, we have only this unoriginal original featuring an A-list trio running, thieving and joking their way around a baker’s dozen of international locales in a vain attempt to outrun the creeping notion that we’re watching a shameless pastiche of Raiders of the Lost Ark, National Treasure, To Catch a Thief and fill in your favorite James Bond adventure. Johnson, at least, should know better, having starred in two other empty calorie films from Red Notice writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber, including 2018’s Skyscraper, another formulaic and derivative spectacle that now feels like a dry run for Netflix’s comfort food caper.
Here, Johnson plays FBI profiler John Hartley who’s in hot pursuit of art thief Nolan Booth (Reynolds). In Rome, Booth has his twinkling eye on one of three large, bedazzled, Fabergé-style eggs that were supposedly a gift from Marc Antony to Cleopatra on their wedding day. After a frenetic and choppily-edited post-theft chase in the Castel Sant’Angelo, Hartley catches up to Booth at the latter’s Bali digs (where Booth product-places himself a glass of Aviation Gin, which was produced by a company co-owned by Reynolds before being sold for $610M). Waiting for them is Interpol Inspector Das (Ritu Arya, holding her own against all that star wattage). She arrests Booth, who committed the theft and Hartley, who’s been framed for it by an even more accomplished art thief known as The Bishop (Gadot, who fails to reach the necessary level of deliciously evil).
As Hartley and Booth cool their jets at a Russian mountaintop prison and agree to partner up and take down The Bishop, Johnson and Reynolds settle into their schtick. The charming and big-hearted former wrestler is reduced to playing exasperated straight man to the ever-winking Reynolds, whose free-flowing wisecracks, which account for most of the film’s laughs, are showing signs of mold. His references to Pulp Fiction, Borat, Instagram, Etsy and Post Malone betray an actor who found one monetizable comedic gear and is now driving it into the ground. It worked wonders in the two hilarious Deadpool films but what would normally lighten up a leaden production like Red Notice serves as another pre-fabricated element in a movie that already steals more often than Booth himself.
The Cleopatra eggs are such a MacGuffin that Reynolds even refers to them as such, so at least he knows what movie he’s making. Indeed, in the absence of old-school action-adventure magic, Red Notice works best when the movie and the audience come to the mutual understanding that this is all ridiculous so let’s have fun with it. The Russian soldier “liking” a social media photo of a shirtless Vladimir Putin and the famous British singer who proves more drool-worthy than all the Cleopatra eggs in the world at least give Red Notice a personality. The exploding bridge, the chase through an abandoned mine and the umpteenth version of The Fugitive-esque “movie star makes perilous jump down a waterfall” shot, while expertly choreographed with high-energy, merely flit by unmemorably until the next expertly choreographed with high-energy action scene.
Red Notice is trying very hard to entertain us and it would be unfair to claim that the film is devoid of all value and that $200M can’t buy a thrill to be enjoyed while sitting on your couch. But all elements smack of fealty to engagement times, completion rates and factors as minute as when you pause, rewind or fast forward content. All the classic films that Red Notice cribs from didn’t worry about any of those metrics which is why they became beloved enough to copy. No one will be copying anything they saw during Red Notice because its primary purpose is not to be loved. Its primary purpose is to be watched.