- 15 cert; 115 min. Dir: Rawson Marshall Thurber
“Look for a box that says ‘MacGuffin’,” quips Ryan Reynolds in Netflix’s smirk-stuffed action comedy Red Notice. He and two fellow treasure hunters (Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot) are raiding a long-abandoned Nazi bunker, which might as well be a lost ark, somewhere beneath the Argentinian jungle.
A MacGuffin, as Hitchcock would remind you, is any object that drives the plot forward just because everyone wants it. There are three identical ones in this flick, scattered treasures from Cleopatra’s tomb. Weirdly, we’re told Cleo had a fetish for what look exactly like Fabergé eggs, beating the Russian royals to this glitzy fad by a couple of thousand years, but the notion is hardly any more ridiculous than anything else in the script.
Wobbling along a very thin line between knowingly silly heist shenanigans and derelict trash is writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber, responsible for Dodgeball and two of Johnson’s previous vehicles, Central Intelligence and Skyscraper.
The dull-ish role for our leading man is FBI profiler John Hartley, who’s trying to keep tabs on the world’s two foremost art thieves: Reynolds’s Nolan Booth, an Arsène Lupin wannabe who kicks things off in Rome with the old egg-switcheroo, and Sarah Black, aka “The Bishop” (a much more occasional Gadot), who has a habit of showing up, framing both men for her own escapades, then moving on to the next egg/act.
Her patsies are soon escaping a Siberian prison to chase after her, but not before lewd jokes about soap in the shower: the film insists on a level of Johnson/Reynolds bro-moeroticism that’s practically indecent. There’s also a scene where Gadot applies electrodes to unseen areas of Johnson while singing Petula Clark’s Downtown, if you like that sort of thing.
