Since today’s stars are franchises and intellectual properties, star-driven movies are becoming increasingly rare. With Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds in the lead roles, Netflix’s new action-comedy Red Notice is headlined by a trio of the only bona fide movie stars left in Hollywood: a Marvel star, a DC star, and a man who is a franchise unto himself. Johnson plays a framed FBI profiler slapped with a “red notice” – Interpol’s scarlet letter – who teams up with the world’s second most notorious art thief (Reynolds) to bring down the world’s most notorious art thief (Gadot).Johnson and Reynolds have strong on-screen chemistry. They’re reliable leading men with both action hero chops and comedic talents, and the specific differences in their acting styles – Johnson is a consummate showman, while Reynolds is dry and sardonic – make them a well-matched pair of A-listers. But they need a better script to take advantage of that chemistry.
Johnson And Reynolds’ Chemistry Is Let Down By A Weak Script
The few glimmers of greatness in Red Notice prove that this duo could do a great job with a movie like Midnight Run or Rush Hour, but the difference between those movies and this one is that Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker had much stronger material to work with. Johnson and Reynolds are let down by a weak script. Their characters are only mismatched because the premise says so: one is a lawman, the other is a criminal. Nonsensical plotting is excusable in an action movie, but only if there’s an engaging character dynamic to carry it.
Out of the three leads, Gadot is the only one who gets to play a real character. Like every part he’s played since 2016, Reynolds plays a version of Deadpool. Johnson channels his carefully cultivated screen persona as the same generic wholesome yet badass action hero he plays in all his movies. As the villainous “The Bishop,” Gadot gets to play a kind of role she’s never played before – a hammed-up baddie – and she has a lot of fun leaning into the femme fatale aspects of the character.
The CGI-heavy set-pieces are flat and listless, but Red Notice has some impressive action sequences. There’s an early fight scene on some scaffolding that doesn’t match the intensity of a similar sequence in Shang-Chi, where the scaffolding was on the outside of a skyscraper, but it’s brought to life with inventive choreography and swooping tracking shots.
A Lot Of The Humor In Red Notice Doesn’t Land
With this and his last movie Skyscraper (another Johnson vehicle), writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber has left behind his comedic roots and become a straightforward action filmmaker. Red Notice positions itself as an action-comedy, but it falls short on the comedy side – especially considering Thurber helmed such hysterical comedy gems as Dodgeball and We’re the Millers.
The movie has some great isolated gags. A Russian prison guard browsing through his Instagram feed likes a photo of shirtless Vladimir Putin on horseback. Johnson steals a sports car and gears up for a car chase set to the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage,” then immediately crashes it and cuts off the music before he can begin the pursuit. But the gags that work are few and far between. Most of the film’s humor doesn’t land.
The majority of Reynolds’ quips feel like Deadpool Lite with forced self-awareness like saying, “Great foot chase, right?” at the end of a foot chase sequence. The Deadpool movies are shot with a handful of alts for each one-liner so the producers can see which ones play better with audiences. Being a bloated Netflix movie, Red Notice seems to include all the alts. Reynolds delivers quip after quip after quip and Johnson just stares at him until he’s done. This exercise becomes tiresome within the first few minutes.
The Deadpool-Style Self-Awareness Is Lazy And Forced
The meta nods to the overused screenwriting techniques at play are similarly dull. When the bad guy mentions that they’re below a bullfight, Reynolds says, “That’s called foreshadowing.” When they’re looking for the MacGuffin, Reynolds tells Johnson to “look for a box that says ‘MacGuffin’ on it.” This doesn’t make Red Notice a smart deconstruction of action movie tropes; it only serves to highlight its own lazy, formulaic plotting. The movie itself doesn’t care, so it’s hard for the audience to care.
Ultimately, Red Notice can’t decide what it wants to be. It starts off as a slick heist caper, but in its second act, it devolves into the kind of globetrotting adventure that James Bond and Indiana Jones are known for. Reynolds even whistles John Williams’ Indy theme as they seek hidden treasure in the jungle. From the beginning, Red Notice is content to be a cut-and-dried action blockbuster derivative of existing genre classics – and it can’t even decide which classics it wants to be derivative of.
Red Notice does what it says on the tin. It’s a fun-filled, action-packed crime caper capitalizing on the star power of Johnson, Reynolds, and Gadot. It’s just a shame that it doesn’t go above and beyond those expectations. Like countless other Netflix originals, it provides a couple of hours of breezy entertainment, but it’s forgotten as soon as the end credits roll and the streamer offers up some more content.