Red Notice (Parent And Baby Screening) (12A)

FBI Agent John Hartley prides himself on being the greatest tracker of criminals in the world but he meets his match in glamorous art thief Sarah Black aka The Bishop. She frames him for a crime he didn't commit and he serves time behind bars, where he nurtures an insatiable hunger for revenge. Once he is free, Hartley pressgangs conman and rival art thief Nolan Booth into helping him take down The Bishop and restore his tattered reputation.

LondonNet Film Review
Red Notice (12A)

Three of the biggest (and most expensive) stars in the glittering Hollywood firmament – Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot – wisecrack, trade blows and wilfully defy the laws of physics in Rawson Marshall Thurber’s entertaining but lightweight escapade. Red Notice is soaked in nostalgia for old-fashioned treasure hunts a la Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Romancing The Stone. It’s no coincidence that Reynolds’ thief absent-mindedly whistles composer John Williams’ theme for Indiana Jones as he descends a staircase. Later, in a vast warehouse of priceless artefacts, he tells Johnson’s fugitive to “Look for a box that says MacGuffin” pointedly referencing a meaningless object employed by scriptwriters to nudge along a plot. Reynolds’ self-referential nods and winks are fun but they feel like a dilution of the Canadian actor’s reliable shtick as Deadpool…

The male leads catalyse a lightly effervescent double-act while Gadot trades in sensuality and strength, most notably in a sexually charged tango sequence with Johnson that echoes a dance d’amour from True Lies. Writer-director Thurber, who worked with Johnson on Central Intelligence and Skyscraper, indulges his love of overblown action sequences with a breathless chase along collapsing scaffolding and an explosive jailbreak that asks us to believe one of the actors has ninja-like reflexes to dodge a surface-to-air missile. The budget is clearly huge but the thrills are decidedly modest.

John Hartley (Johnson) is a top profiler in the FBI’s Behavioural Analysis Unit, who uses his knowledge of the criminal mind to outwit art thief Nolan Booth (Reynolds) during the attempted robbery of one of Cleopatra’s fabled golden eggs from a museum in Rome. Interpol agent Inspector Urvashi Das (Ritu Arya) and her team work alongside Hartley to catch Booth in the act and consign him to a Russian gulag. Duplicitous rival art thief The Bishop (Gadot) subsequently frames Hartley and he is condemned to a grim future as Booth’s cell mate while she prepares to steal the jewelled eggs for an Egyptian billionaire, who has offered 300 million dollars for all three trinkets as a wedding present for his daughter.

The most challenging target will be the private art collection of vicious gangster Sotto Voce (Chris Diamantopoulos), whose hi-tech security system is amusingly described as “always watching, always listening – kinda like Alexa, except with guns”. Hungry for revenge, Hartley reluctantly joins forces with Booth to break out of their snowbound mountaintop prison, take down The Bishop and restore his tattered reputation.

Red Notice plays to the strengths of the three leads but doesn’t stretch anyone or upend our expectations of a glossy, globe-trotting chase that repeatedly puts pyrotechnics ahead of plausibility. A couple of satisfying kinks in Thurber’s script are telegraphed in advance but don’t spoil our enjoyment, keeping a flimsy plot in motion and baiting hooks for a potential sequel. That seems a remote possibility considering the limited bangs for big bucks on display.

– Kim Hu