They’re forced into an uneasy partnership due to some guff about three golden eggs that Cleopatra used to own and that Booth is trying to steal. But while the stage is set for a sleek James Bond meets Indiana Jones meets Ocean’s Eleven meets Dirty Rotten Scoundrels caper, writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber stumbles on his way there, misfiring on every conceivable level, a film trying so hard to recall the fun of other films that it forgets to have any fun for itself.Ī red notice is a type of high-level international warrant afforded to an on-the-run-criminal, causing FBI agent John Hartley (Johnson) to track slippery art thief Nolan Booth (Reynolds) all the way to Rome. It’s easy to see why as there’s inherently safe global appeal – Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot starring in an action comedy about global heists – elements that would make this worth the investment in or outside of the lower stakes world of streaming. The script was at one point the centre of a heated auction with all the majors jostling for rights before Universal snapped them up but down the line, there was trepidation over the expense and Netflix stepped in to give the green light instead. Like an increasing number of the streamer’s mass-market offerings, the overriding message appears to be: see, we can make films just as badly as everyone else! So much for the great disruptor …
But what makes the film so maddening, along with many, many other reasons, is that it’s the most boringly indistinctive patchwork job we’ve seen for a long while, a beige piece of committee-approved product that slums from point A to point B to who cares.
So with the arrival of Red Notice, a film that allegedly cost upwards of $200m, making it Netflix’s biggest budget to date, one might hope for something slightly out of the ordinary, a much-needed tweak on what a traditional studio might otherwise lazily offer.
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