It doesn’t feel that long ago that seeing a cast like Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot in a movie from Netflix would have been a remarkable occurrence. And yet, it’s now somehow completely normal to see some of the biggest movie stars in the world make a big-budget action movie like Red Notice, that is expected to be watched at home on your television. But what are critics thinking of the streaming movie?
Red Notice will be getting a limited theatrical release this weekend ahead of its November 12th arrival on Netflix, and so reviews of the action-comedy have arrived. And while the stars may be big for this adventure, there are some split opinions as to whether they’re used well in Red Notice. CinemaBlend’s Sean O’Connell is one who thinks the film is actually really quite good. In his four-star review, he says that, while there are many films that try to be what Red Notice is, even movies that some of these actors have previously made, this is the best of them. According to Sean…
This movie is just legitimately cool. And when you see how cool it is, you recognize how many imitators try to capture the essence of all the things Red Notice is peddling, but fall woefully short.
If we’re being honest, few reviews are quite as unqualified raves as this one. That’s not to say there aren’t positive responses to Red Notice, as there absolutely are. It’s simply that some of the other critics that give the action-comedy a pass fall more into the “hey, it’s fun” category. Indiewire is one of those. It’s reviews opens by claiming that, based on some of Netflix’s previous efforts, Red Notice, should be terrible, but somehow it’s not…
Call it an early Hanukkah miracle (as one drop of inspiration somehow manages to power this movie for almost two full hours), but Red Notice is a lot of fun, if often in spite of itself.
And then there are those reviews that don’t cut Red Notice even that much slack. While this is a type of film that we’ve certainly seen before, and some believe this is a better version of it, IGN says that Red Notice borrows too much from those other films, and really falls short when it tries to borrow from much better movies, saying...
Red Notice starts with a lot of energetic potential but then devolves into a pastiche of other, better films, cribbing scenes that feel like they were lifted straight from a myriad of films from Indiana Jones to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
And then there are the reviews that are just brutal. Even some of the negative reviews of Red Notice give it some credit. Maybe they think Ryan Reynolds is really funny, or that Dwayne Johnson puts in the work, even if Ryan Reynolds endless jokes get tiring, but some reviews are significantly more critical. Polygon calls Red Notice “as bad as blockbuster movies can possibly get,” continuing…
Featuring a trio of supposed movie stars who lack the panache or charisma of true marquee headliners, Red Notice is another visually ghastly bid at building a franchise on the back of breathtakingly boring action sequences.
It’s somewhat rare to see a movie get quite such a wide variety of responses from critics, but it’s a safe bet that Red Notice will see that same variety of responses from the general audience. A lot of people will probably watch the movie, if you already have Netflix, why wouldn’t you? But once they do it seems they’ll likely all have very different takeaways.
