Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Red Notice’ on Netflix, a Pointless Junk-Food Action-Comedy Guaranteed to Waste Your Time

Action-comedy caper-hijinks extravaganza Red Notice is famously Netflix’s most expensive movie, its budget crowning at $200 million. It also has a trio of famous stars in Ryan Reynolds, Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot. But considering it barely made a dent during a recent theatrical run and has earned a big shrug of indifference in terms of pre-streaming-release hype, it may become famous for being forgettable.

RED NOTICE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Once upon a time there were three golden eggs that once belonged to Cleopatra. One’s in a museum, one’s owned by a billionaire and one’s lost. There’s yer MacGuffin inventory. Now the characters, who might as well be MacGuffins too: Nolan Booth (Reynolds) is the world’s greatest art thief, self-proclaimed of course, and he schemes to snatch egg no. 1 from a museum in Rome. As the self-proclaimed world’s greatest profiler of art thieves, FBI agent John Hartley (Johnson) is gonna stop him, and he does, for a minute. But The Bishop (Gadot) is like, no, I’M the world’s greatest art thief, and ninjas off with the egg, framing Hartley for thiefly shenanigans. All this involves “globe-hopping” to CGI “locations” in ROME and BALI and RUSSIA, where the gulag awaits for the former world’s greatest profiler of art thieves. Shit sucks.

So Hartley walks into his cell, and whaddaya know, Booth is his cellmate. Of all the gin joints in the world. They do the verbal back-and-forth as only Ryan Reynolds and The Rock can, you know, like, “Hey baldilocks,” crap like that. They strike a deal: This odd couple duo will set aside their animosities and team up to steal egg no. 2, which will inevitably draw The Bishop to the scene, and Hartley can arrest her and clear his name. Sounds airtight. What could possibly go wrong. But first they have to stage a prison break, which involves bazookas and helicopters. They end up in FAKE CGI LONDON and then FAKE CGI SPAIN, where they infiltrate a costume party held by a scummy arms dealer who keeps his stolen ancient artifacts in a heavily guarded super-hyper-cyber-locked Mission: Impossible/Entrapment vault, which of course they have to concoct a convoluted scheme to open, but somehow, they end up smack in the middle of a bullfighting ring, getting their asses hammered by a future pile of sirloins and New York strips. C’mon everyone, all together now, let’s Grouchy Smurf this one: I HATE when that happens!

But. Where’s the egg no. 3? Booth thinks he knows, and it involves long-buried stolen Nazi loot, which brings them to FAKE CGI SOUTH AMERICA for a jaunt through the jungle. And of course, The Bishop is always a step ahead of these two oafs. At this point, the plot pauses so the characters can talk about their daddy issues, which I like to call Past MacGuffins. This is supposed to make us care about them a little bit as human beings, human beings who don’t always ticker-tape canned-in-heavy-syrup banter at each other — theoretically, anyway. But you do know MacGuffins ultimately mean nothing in the grand scheme of a movie, right? Well, then, we may have just found a rare treasure of our own here: the first movie in history that’s just one big MacGuffin.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Take your pick of generic Rock actioners: Skyscraper, San Andreas, the Jumanjis, Faster, etc. Reynolds-wise, Red Notice has some rank Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard or Green Lantern dreck-vibes. It makes reference to Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is foolish, because this movie makes National Treasure look like The Bicycle Thief.

Performance Worth Watching: All this star power, and none of it’s worth putting an eyeball on. I plead the fifth.

Memorable Dialogue: Interpol agent Das (Ritu Arya) arrests Booth:

Das: Keep making jokes, because I’m about to send you to the worst place in the world.

Booth: Your Instagram account?

Sex and Skin: None. TBPITTF: Too Busy Phoning It In To F—-.

Our Take: Red Notice is the movie equivalent of 3,000 empty calories of greasy fat and sodium, a nutritionless brain-clogging McMovie no-value meal, the Triple-Cheese McGuffin with extra bloat and a generous portion of partially gelatinated gum-based CGI. Writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber’s (Skyscraper) screenplay uses witless exchanges of dialogue to patch together lifeless assemblages of noise and movement passing for action sequences. It offers diminishing returns from the first minute, and keep in mind, there are 117 more to go.

“Red Notice is the movie equivalent of 3,000 empty calories of greasy fat and sodium, a nutritionless brain-clogging McMovie no-value meal, the Triple-Cheese McGuffin with extra bloat and a generous portion of partially gelatinated gum-based CGI.”

But it stars Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot, and their electric charisma could keep the lights on in Vegas for weeks, one might argue. For sure. But when their motive is less creative and more a hefty chunk of that $200 million, it’s a shameless endeavor. They play to their well-worn personae — respectively, amiable meathead, snarkmeister general and lowercase-Ws wonder woman — in lieu of being asked to do anything fresh or interesting. Visually, it’s an abomination, artificial lighting aimed at phony sets and overdressed actors, wads of plastic baking under the heat lamps. It all looks very expensive and very atrocious, making one wonder about the true value of American currency. It’s just paper, right? And paper burns very easily.

“Dreck” is too kind a word to levy at this thing. Red Notice is hopeless, destined to be turned off or slept through. The plot is a series of double- and triple-crosses, and the quadruple-cross victimizes you, should you watch it in its entirety. Technically, it’s a movie, but even more technically, it’s product. Useless, disposable product.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Witless, lifeless, shameless, hopeless, useless — pointless.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Red Notice on Netflix