Red Notice (2021) Movie Review
Red Notice (2021) is the latest outing from Netflix and is a comedy, action, heist, adventure blend which is about an FBI agent trying to bring down the world’s greatest thief with the help of the second greatest after things go screwy apprehending the latter. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot, I got excited and gave it a watch. Sadly, it turned out to be a very middling experience.
One would expect that there would be a great deal of charisma, enthusiasm and quality back-and-forth banter with the Actors (particularly the male duo) the movie has at its disposal but one would be wrong. It’s not that there isn’t any but what you get for the most part and for a lack of a better word, is pure MEH. It’s not terrible, you can stomach it but there is nothing special here. Ryan Reynolds felt like he was doing most of the heavy work by being his usual self with some of the Deadpool persona bleeding in improvising in a not-so-good script still being my favourite part of the movie, whereas the Rock was oddly enough living up to his name, by being a rock, and for whatever reason, he or the director decided this would be the movie for it, against Deadpool… It’s good to live up to your name but you still gotta choose an appropriate time and this was not it. Gal Gadot, while being gorgeous and someone who looked like she was having fun, also came with a heft dose of cringe in some of her scenes.
Couple that with the goofy nature of the movie which, in a better-written film with interesting comradery between the characters could have been highly entertaining, with a plot that is easily forgettable with the propensity for “twists” without the wit to carry whatever level of self-awareness that movies try to present leaves you with a mishmash of elements taken from much better films where neither the sum of its parts nor the whole is as entertaining as it should have been. Again, it’s MEH.
Also, with a reported $200 Million budget, it has some pretty shoddy visuals at times while having some cool shots and sets otherwise. This is a repeated trend I’ve seen in big-budget movies lately where they’ll have massive budgets but you don’t see that reflected in the visuals/production properly. And if DUNE can look wonderful with a relatively lower budget, these other movies have no excuse with the level of CGI they end up using.
Anyway, I was hoping for a lot more fun than I ended up experiencing. You get a massive sequel bait at the end and there are two more entries greenlit by Netflix, so we’ll get more of this Trio. Not excited but who knows, they might end up being better. This is an average experience at best which I can’t really recommend unless you have nothing else to watch and just want something to pass the time. And if I were to rate it, I’d give it a 5/10.
