though flawed, "Red Notice" is at least a solid blast of lightweight fun;
Exactly what you'd expect from a crime-caper action-comedy pairing Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds. Nothing more, nothing less
this film would appear to have all the right ingredients for a franchise-ready adventure, yet something's notably off when the pieces are mixed together
there's something so soulless and ineffectual about the aggressively unnecessary Red Notice that it almost plays like a pastiche of a Hollywood blockbuster, like a bot consumed the last 20 years of studio fare and spat out a facsimile as an experiment
the result is a bizarre and sporadically entertaining oddity; The relentless bickering between Ryan Reynolds and Dwayne Johnson is wearisome rather than hilarious
it has plenty of logic gaps, over-the-top action, and is generally a lot of fun. Red Notice doesn't quite coalesce into something that could become a timeless classic of its own, but it provides plenty of entertainment
a starry action comedy too slapstick-silly to take seriously; Rawson Marshall Thurber's starry heist thriller feels less like a caper than a live-action cartoon, a grab bag of strenuously madcap shenanigans loosely gathered into movie form
a depressing reminder of what Hollywood considers "original" material these days, "Red Notice" plays one of those self-consciously convoluted, ultimately derivative long cons that strain so hard to seem breezily insouciant they wind up wearing you out
"Red Notice" works surprisingly well for what it is; Rawson Marshall Thurber delivers a dumb-fun race between crooks and cops to locate three artifacts once belonging to Cleopatra
"Red Notice" is a lifeless pastiche of various blockbuster action-movie styles from the past four decades; It may not be clever or original, but at least it doles out amusingly asinine plot twists with clockwork-like regularity
by Dan Jolin [Empire Magazine ]
by Benjamin Lee [The Guardian ]
by Rachel LaBonte [ScreenRant ]
by Keith Watson [Slant Magazine ]
