REVIEW #109 Red Notice (2021)

Red Notice is the latest Netflix original, the largest budget they have designated to a project so far. The film follows John Hartley an Interpol agent who is trying to find and arrest the best art thief in the world.

CAST & THE ACTING 

The cast is fantastic, there’s no denying that. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson plays John Hartley and combined with Ryan Reynolds humour and Gal Gadots cool suave, you would expect Red Notice to excel in this category. However this was not the case, don’t get me wrong there is plenty of humour and Reynolds and The Rock do gel well in that regard but the rest of the performances felt hollow. What I did enjoy was for once they didn’t portray the rock as an invincible Hercules who could literally do anything, he was actually bested on a few occasions in the film, which was refreshing. In terms of the rest of the cast they were very unnecessary and you could tell the focus was firmly on the three big stars because no one else really got a look in. The emphasis was on the partnership between The Rock and Reynolds, who did seem to have a good chemistry on screen but for me the writing wasn’t good enough to do that partnership any justice. Gal Gadot I feel was under utilised and played more of a background character until the twist at the end. 

PLOT & THE STORYLINE 

I was expecting a pretty good spy action comedy, having thoroughly enjoyed Jungle Cruise and Free Guy I was hoping for a fun mash up between the two. Unfortunately the storyline was rather stale and left me bored at times. The concept of the three eggs of cleopatra came across really cheesy and it honestly felt like lazy writing, which was the main issue across the entire film. There were a lot of funny moments, that is always guaranteed with Ryan Reynolds because his delivery of dialogue is one of the best in Hollywood in terms of injecting comedy into scenes. Unfortunately the ending felt so rushed and when I saw Ed Sheeran make a cameo appearance I knew it was game over, the straw that broke the camels back almost. I’m really not a fan of those sort of cameos. The twist was actually quite a good one, it was unexpected and actually sets up a sequel pretty well. Considering the film was Netflix’s largest opening weekend ever, I would assume that the sequel will be announced pretty quickly, despite poor reviews. So overall the writing let down a plot with such potential which meant Red Notice missed the mark.

CINEMATOGRAPHY & SPECIAL EFFECTS 

This category I have a lot of mixed feelings about because on one hand there were a lot of beautiful settings that were filmed on location and looked great. But on the other hand there was also so many green screen parts that were painfully obvious. For example the whole scene with the bull, which for me was just unnecessary and looked awful! The camera work was a strong point, specifically when Reynolds was attempting to flee The Rock towards the start of the film! It was so fluid and almost followed his movements exactly which gave a nice natural, yet chaotic feel to the scene. This camerawork also complimented the combat choreography in the same way, by making it all look natural and fluid. So an equal amount of pros and cons here I would say.

OVERALL (5/10)

The overwhelming feeling with Red Notice is that it failed to live up to its potential. With such a strong cast that usually always delivers a fun and exciting film, I found myself losing interest quite a lot of the time. The main culprit is certainly the poor writing that created a cheesy plot, that was only partly saved by the humour that is ever present in the film. The chemistry between Reynolds and The Rock was good but Gadot was under utilised. With Netflix’s largest budget I thought that high quality cinematography and special effects would be almost guaranteed but the green screen scenes were so obvious at times. So unfortunately Red Notice under delivered, give it a go if you’re stuck on things to watch but I don’t think it’ll be a film that I will rewatch. 

Thanks for Reading.

Callan