Red Notice
starring Gal Gadot, Dwayne The Rock "Johnson," Ryan Reynolds, Ritu Arya and Chris Diamantopoulos
directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber (We're the Millers, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, oh and only fucking Skyscraper, everyone!)
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First of all, LOOK, THERE ARE GOING TO BE SPOILERS. If you're going to read this before you see this thing, you've made your choices, friend.
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If you've seen any of the trailers for this thing, the first and most obvious spoiler is going to be: this is not the worst movie I've ever seen! No, as long as the Michael Bay oeuvre continues to exist, I can't envision a future that doesn't have at least two of those fucking Transformer movies square at the bottom, stuck in like 130 tons of old condoms and wet wipes in a London sewer. Those movies are so execrably excremental, I can't even remember which one of them I hated so much that I walked out of the theater (I had pre-teen children at the time, get off my ass) absolutely certain that I would never forget the experience of having endured that tent-fire-in-a-hobo-camp kind of day. But the next ones proved to be so similarly and blandly awful, I genuinely get them confused now. I'm pretty sure it was one of the Mark Wahlberg ones. But re-reading that sentence, I mean, how could it not be?
Anyway, Red Notice sucks, but that's not why I'm writing about it. It was made and distributed on this fucked-up post-COVID model where it's sort of in theaters but also on Netflix at exactly the same time. I get going out of your way to go see Dune in a theater. That's got forty-story-tall anus-faced LSD worms jumping out of a desert to try to make out with a space twink and his MILF co-pilot. You don't watch that in your living room if you have a choice. Red Notice has a couple of car chases, the laziest and least interesting "action" trope in the history of filmed entertainment. A car goes by quickly. Great. I did 80 mph on a public road yesterday, by myself if you don't count the thousand other people going just as fast or faster all around me at the same time. If I can do it, it's not "action." Tom Cruise spiral-exploded his tibia jumping across a 20-foot space between tall buildings, just to entertain me. You have to do better than "assorted speeding."
My kids came over and I was going to watch Free Guy, mostly because I'd recently finally watched Killing Eve and I want to see Jodie Comer in more things, but not necessarily a medieval knights movie written by the Good Will Hunting guys. But my kids, who are gamers, had heard Free Guy doesn't take video games seriously enough or some shit(?) so I told them instead, we would watch Red Notice, not because it was good, but precisely because I'd heard it was terrible.
Did it deliver? Reader, it did.
The phenomenon of so-bad-it's-good is not something I pretend I invented, nor is it anywhere near new. In fact, in the course of writing this just a few minutes ago, I learned for the first time that this movie was written and directed by the same guy who made the last (for me) oh-my-god-this-looks-terrible-we-have-to-see-it movie Skyscraper, the 2018 magnum opus where The Rock fights a building and fucking wins. That time only my youngest went with me, to an actual movie theater, where we paid first-run ticket prices to watch my guy Dwayne karate kick motherfuckers off rooftops with his prosthetic leg. We went in there knowing the premise, knowing it was going to be awful and we left fucking thrilled. Deeply, deeply un-disappointed. It was awful. A triumph.
I really wanted that experience here. And for the most part, I got it. It's fun to watch a "smart" movie written by an objectively un-smart person. Say what you want about M. Night Shyamalan* but his cornball love-letters to himself at least understand pacing and space, how to time the BIG TWIST even if in the end the BIG TWIST is only that much more disappointing because the competence of the set-up unfairly built your expectations. M. Night movies are never good fun because a) they take themselves deadly fucking seriously and b) their are tragically undermined by a reasonable level of execution in production.
Red Notice you will be relieved to know is not burdened by any of that shit. But it is still not any good. Part of the problem is the casting, for both reasons: it is both too good and too not good. Ryan Reynolds is cast as Ryan Reynolds, so he is actually charming in that earnest and limited way that Canadians can be charming. Dwayne is Dwayne, so you get all the glowering baldness you expect. He's rarely believable as a human in his roles, but I dare you to show me one other person who gets more out of acting with their trapezius muscles than he does. And Gal Gadot is... well, she's probably the most disappointing because she's not bad, but she doesn't get anything to do except appear dramatically from behind furniture in rooms she's not expected to be in (although you really do come to expect her to be in them the third or fourth time this happens). Sadly, this is the exact same thing Ritu Arya gets to do, except each time she does it, she gets to shout "Freeze! International Police!" And they say there are no good roles for women.
We got through most of it and it was a jolly good waste of everyone's time and energy, just like we hoped. And then... well, there are lines, people. At a certain point, if the incompetence reaches a certain level, you can no longer suspend the suspension of disbelief and even enjoy a thing on a meta-ironic level. I won't go into it in great detail, but there's (another fucking) car chase that involves a LOT of vehicles in a space that it is made clear to the viewer from the jump that no car could possibly get into. Sure, you have a good laugh about how stupid it is, but in the end, it's not that you're insulted as a viewer or embarrassed for the writer who maybe did their best and absentmindedly left a plot hole. Dumb and terrible are forgivable--even enjoyable--sins. Lazy and cynical, well, now you've made me think about the wasted time and I'm kinda mad. You broke the spell, man.
I know you probably already have Netflix, which is where I saw it. You already pay the monthly fee, so it doesn't cost you anything extra to watch this if the mood strikes you. I think what I'm saying is if the mood does strike you, you should karate kick it off a rooftop with a prosthetic limb of some kind. You can rent Skyscraper right now on Amazon for like $4.
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*Like for example "what kind of insufferable emo dipshit nicknames themselves 'Night?'"
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