Red Notice: just enough to press play

by Elisa Giudici

As early as the prologue, Red Notice sets the bar so low that you instantly know to shut up and meekly accept every absurd thing it gives you. When an adventure movie starts with Marcus Antonius gifting his future bride Queen Cleopatra with 3 Fabergé jeweled eggs around 1000 years before Gustav Fabergé himself came to the world, you know realism is not high on the list of the movie's priorities. Not a priority at all, whether in the past or the present. Five minutes later we are introduced to Dwayne Johnson's FBI criminal profiler John Hartley. Sporting a black turtleneck (and later a silk patterned scarf), the notion of The Rock being a criminal profiler is so improbable that the screenplay mounts a preemptive defense. "You don't look like one".

"I get that a lot" replies The Rock, introducing us to a parallel world in which a lot of characters are nonsensical in service of an action-comedy about art thieves and double plays.  This is the kind of movie in which the audience will likely forgive anything, provided they are offered some spectacle, a few good liners, and chemistry between glamorous supertstars. Unfortunately, Red Notice lacks almost any of these elements...

Even if you embrace the silliness of Red Notice's screenplay with a benign smile, you'll wonder how they made a $200 million budget look so cheap. Was director Rawson Marshall Thurber moving the camera in a twitchy way to aoivd the fake-looking sets? Why would someone create a CGI-generated colored glass window that shatters when the stars crash against it when you can simply using simple fake glass that looks one hundred times more realistic? Is it laziness or merely an example of a shifting mindset in Hollywood that leads modern tentpole movies to opt, automatically, to deploy bad visual effects when practical effects will be more effective? Red Notice isn't fun or silly enough to prevent these distracting questions that wouldn't plague a better adventure movie.

Red Notice is quite enjoyable and fun IF you compare it to other streaming movies designed to fill the "content" catalogue with new titles every week.  I wish I could forget other recent similar action movies like 6 Underground or Ava (file the latter under "things I saw for Jessica Chastain and highly regret") the way I will easily forget Red Notice. It isn't scarring and, with the right expectations about this "catch me catch you" title, it is enough to press play on the remote. Just barely.

Shockingly, Red Notice was  originally designed to be released in movie theatres by Universal. The studio is said to have engaged in a bidding war to produce the third collaboration between director and screenwriter Rawson Marshall Thurber and Dwayne Johnson. In its eventual home, Red Notice can aspire to win audience attention by being in the 'top ten' column on Netflix's homepage. The movie would not have survived the mugh higher level of commitment required to go to the theatre for something that makes other Johnson-led movies like Jumanji and Jungle Cruise look like major cinematic experiences.

The heartbreaking part of all this is that Red Notice is one of the rare would-be crowdpleasers that is not based on a book, a true story, or a previous franchise. Why put so much money into a movie made with so little effort and cast Gal Gadot in a leading role solely based on her hotness in a revealing red dress? Neither Gadot nor Ryan Reynolds do very much with their roles, but they aren't exactly asked to either. 

So was the budget eaten up by The Rock? Dwayne Johnson continues to make the most predictable stories feel easygoing, and the most improbable character somehow likable. The chemistry with the other two protagonists is nonexistent, and yet Johnson manages to be quite funny despite the script.

 

Uncharted, Now You See Me, Indiana Jones: there are a lot of echoes in this movie, yet the most interesting comparison for me is with The Mummy Returns. Twenty years ago The Rock was cast as an improbable King in an adventure sequel based on such an improbable version of Ancient Egypt, that Fabergé eggs would not seem out of context at all. It is difficult to recall details of the plot so many years ago but I can remember some costumes and how funny it was in a notably over-the-top kind of way. I saw Red Notice just yesterday and remember almost nothing!

Of course, I am 20 years older and I see many more movies per year than I did in 2001, but the only impressive aspect of Red Notice is how very unimpressive it is. Is the contemporary star system unable to make an ordinary adventure movie stand out with the power of star charisma or are today's blockbusters constructed so weakly that they rely too completely on the recognizable faces on the movie posters to convince us to press play? Red Notice left me filled with hamletic dilemmas about streaming-era cinema.

Comments

[davidandwaffles]

If you want to know real AVA regret, I watched it for 95 seconds of Geena Davis!

[thevoid99]

The fact that film also features product placements for a bunch of shitty-ass alcoholic tequila and vodka drinks from both Ryan Reynolds and the Crock as well as a cameo from that no-talent racist ginger Ed Sheeran makes me want to avoid this.

In fact, here's what the Crock can do with his stupid-ass vodka. Since he used to tell people to take their favorite objects, shine it up real nice, and stick it straight up their roody-poo candy-ass back in late 90s/early 2000s when he was a God. Why doesn't he just take his own advice as it relates to that shitty-ass drink (for the record, I don't drink alcohol. Never had and never will) where he not only shove it up ass. He can go back to that shithole company that made him a star, schill out whatever bullshit he has to offer and take someone else's spot to the point that it only brings resentment from those who will never rise above a certain ceiling. Once he beats his cousin for a shitty-ass title that doesn't mean shit. He can take part in the downfall of fucking Titan Towers and everything else Vince McMahon had created and then be fed to the wolves from other wrestling companies he tried to take down where the Crock will have no choice but to beg for mercy when he comes face to face with the Murder Grandpa himself Minoru Suzuki who maybe in his mid-late 50s/early 60s but is still sadistic enough to fucking murder someone in and out of the ring!