Shooting action isn’t easy; it wasn’t easy when there were little-to-no restrictions before the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s certainly not easy with the restrictions that have come with the pandemic. Still, we’ve been lucky to enjoy some quality action filmmaking in 2021, both in live-action and animation, including Space Sweepers, Raya and the Last Dragon, Nobody, Godzilla vs. Kong, Kingdom: Ashin of the North, The Suicide Squad, Star Wars: Visions, Maya and the Three, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and No Time To Die. While it looked like the genre would continue this streak with Red Notice, unfortunately the globe-trotting affair is quite possibly one of the worst movies of the year.
Red Notice is written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber and stars Dwayne Johnson as FBI agent John Hartley, Ryan Reynolds as an art thief named Nolan Booth, and Gal Gadot as The Bishop, who is also an art thief and Booth’s rival. The plot revolves around stealing the three priceless golden eggs of Cleopatra and selling them to the highest bidder. The movie opens with Booth stealing one of the golden eggs and Hartley giving chase after being tipped off by The Bishop. Booth initially manages to escape, but Hartley eventually captures Booth, secures the golden egg Booth had stolen, and hands him and the egg over to Interpol. However, Hartley gets framed by The Bishop for giving a fake golden egg to Interpol and allegedly receiving a large sum of money. Hartley is sent to a jail in Russia along with Booth. There they form a temporary alliance to get the eggs, arrest The Bishop, and clear Hartley’s name before The Bishop gets all the eggs and becomes untraceable.
Now, that’s a plot that you can find in the action genre, specifically in the action-adventure sub-genre, very often. But the element that elevates such a story like that are stakes. If they are universal in nature, like an end-of-the-world kind of scenario, then you can hook the audience almost instantly. However, as that method has been done to death, it is being slowly exchanged for personal stakes. This is a little tricky, because that particular process requires intricate character-building so that the audience can relate, or at least empathise, with what’s at stake and join the ride. The problem with Thurber’s writing in Red Notice is that it features neither characters you can root for nor a cause you can rally behind. The world isn’t at any kind of risk, and the characters don’t really care enough about stealing the eggs. They are doing it for the money, obviously, and because they have nothing better to do with their lives. Thurber grants Hartley and Booth a couple of sob stories and “bonding” moments. Sadly, they aren’t genuine enough to get you invested in their journeys.
The problems in the script do not end there. Thurber very much wants Red Notice to be a comedy, but he largely depends on the form of humour which Reynolds has become synonymous with since Deadpool, where he starts with a common observation and ends with an over-exaggerated punchline. For example, Booth randomly points out that Hartley is wearing a leather jacket and then jokes about how a cow had to be killed to make Hartley look that good. There’s no doubt if Red Notice was Reynolds’s second or third movie after Deadpool, this joke would’ve landed. However, since we’ve seen him do it so many times in movies as well as interviews, that punchline is visible from afar. In fact, if you play a game where you take a shot every time you correctly predict the punchline of a joke, you will damage your liver by the end of the second act. Come to think of it, instead of restricting the game to the jokes, you can open it up to any line of dialogue and the plot in general. Then you’ll definitely pass out by the end of the first act.
At this point, you must be wondering: how can a movie with three of the most sought-after stars in Hollywood be so abysmally bad? And that, my friends, is the biggest mystery of Red Notice, even bigger than the mystery around Cleopatra’s third golden egg. Johnson, Reynolds, and Gadot (minus her act of misrepresenting the Israel-Palestine conflict and her pro-IDF stance) are naturally charming, but for some inexplicable reason they are sleepwalking through their respective roles here.
Looking at Red Notice’s overall direction, though, the lack of charm can be chalked up to Thurber’s directorial abilities, or lack thereof. All the scenes which could’ve been used to build on Booth and Harltey’s conflicting ideologies are ruined by focusing on a bunch of grating exchanges that are not worthy of being in a mainstream feature-length Hollywood film. Elementary school-level stage plays nowadays are better written and directed than that. There is one mildly laughable moment between Reynolds and Johnson, where Reynolds dreams about Johnson fawning over him. And then nothing again. Gadot’s role is actually an extended cameo, even though she is one of the stars of the movie. The film had the chance to somewhat redeem the starring trio through the action sequences; however, even those are marred by a sickening amount of switching between the actors and their stunt doubles, and action choreography that doesn’t play to any of their strengths.
After suffering through nearly 120 minutes of Red Notice, you’ll find it difficult to understand what exactly Thurber was going for in terms of the action. The hand-to-hand combat sequences consist of mid-shots, close-ups, and a few establishing shots here and there. Hardly any of the frames stay on-screen for more than three seconds, thereby making the whole experience of watching it incredibly discombobulating. The opening chase involving Booth and Hartley feels like a combination of the final fight in Rush Hour, where Jackie Chan has to save the treasures of China’s dynasties and fight off goons, and the scaffolding fight in Quantum of Solace. But Red Notice fails to come close to either of those set-pieces despite having a budget of $200 million. The fight sequence in the vault containing Cleopatra’s second golden egg is particularly atrocious. There’s a cut between a shot of Gadot bending down to get a gun and a shot of her actually taking the gun in her hand. What was so difficult about such a motion that it had to be divided into two separate shots? We will never know. On top of that, there are unmotivated drone shots, cartoonish CGI-driven set-pieces, and a finale that plays like a cheap copy of one of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’s highly memorable car chases.
Red Notice fails to deliver anything that it promised with its promotional materials. Given how this is Rawson Marshall Thurber’s third action outing, it’s clear that he is interested in the genre. But he doesn’t know how to convey that interest, thereby making cinematographer Markus Förderer and editor Michael L. Sale’s work monumentally tough. The only way you can enjoy Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, or Gal Gadot is if you’re a die-hard fan and hence won’t judge them objectively. Or else, all you will be left with is scene after scene of Thurber attempting to engage you with a plethora of filmmaking techniques that do not complement each other. Red Notice is so devoid of moments, lines, or sequences that will make a mark in your mind that you’ll likely forget that you have even watched the movie once the credits draw to a close.
