Red Notice

Directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, Red Notice follows an FBI agent (Dwayne Johnson’s John Hartley) as he reluctantly teams up with art thief (Ryan Reynolds’ Nolan Booth) to catch Gal Gadot’s mysterious Bishop. Filmmaker Thurber, working from his script, delivers a relentlessly slick endeavor that’s rarely, if ever, as engrossing or exciting as one might’ve anticipated, as the movie suffers from an often palpably bland and generic feel that essentially (and effectively) prevents the viewer from working up much interest in or enthusiasm for the one-dimensional protagonists’ exploits – with the actors’ almost astonishingly lazy efforts going a long way towards perpetuating the arms-length atmosphere. (Both Johnson and Reynolds are riffing on their well-established personas to a seriously grating degree, to be sure.) And although the picture boasts a very small handful of compelling action sequences, Thurber diminishes the impact of such moments by emphasizing hopelessly flat visuals and laughable special effects – which, in turn, prevents the over-the-top third act from possessing the visceral impact Thurber is obviously striving for. The end result is a periodically watchable yet predominantly forgettable misfire that’s hardly the easygoing and effortlessly entertaining caper it could (and should) have been, and it’s impossible, ultimately, not to wonder just what the movie’s notoriously high budget was actually spent on (ie the whole thing just looks cheap, for the most part).

** out of ****