Red Notice starts the Rock, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot in a heist film when the Rock plays special agent John Hartley as he pursues Nolan Booth (Reynolds), the world’s biggest art thief. When Booth steals a egg given to Cleopatra by Marc Antony and is scooped by Bishop (Gadot), he and Hartley end up in prison together and scheme to get out and find her. Bishop meanwhile goes looking for the other two eggs to present with the third and cash in from a buyer who badly wants all three.
The Good
Reynolds and the Rock work great together onscreen. The interactions they had during Hobbs and Shaw was a nice appetizer for the main course that we got here. Reynolds and the Rock had great comic timing together and hit all the right funny notes. Gadot played off of them well here and got to show off her Wonder Woman fighting skills some more. She won’t win any Oscars but she has a nice lane she fits in here with action roles. The movie was well paced and moved along pretty quickly from where I was watching.
The Bad
The is some egregiously bad CGI here. I normally am not a CGI stickler but in this case it was just terrible. Other than that, there was some clunky dialogue here and there but all in all nothing that was a deal breaker. I’d also say that overall it fell short of that next gear to be great as well.
Other Stuff
You know the drill with both the Rock and Gadot. Rock plays himself and Gadot has a formula that she sticks too as well. We’ve seen Rock do some real acting but Gadot definitely needs to stay in this lane she’s found. Reynolds is essentially the glue that holds things together here and without him we’d have an entirely movie, one that was far less enjoyable. There’s also a huge plot twist towards the end that I did not see coming, that added some major cool points, and a funny cameo from Ed Sheeran of all people.
Final Verdict: 7/10
Overall quality: 4/6 (good), Enjoyability: 3/4
I was thinking ‘this is fine’ until the last 15 minutes when things took a sharp turn for the better. So it’s a little more than fine. I’d say that minus some of the dialogue it’s a mostly good, fun movie and an easy rewatch. Netflix is the right place for it in that it probably would have felt a bit lacking had I seen it in the theater but it was just about right to watch at home on a big TV. I’d watch a sequel with this cast as well, they were that good together, but sequels to heist comedies tend to not be so great so it’s probably best to leave it here. But I do recommend this one, it’s a fun time.
Stroke of Genius 