Red Notice Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

Downs...

5. The Shockingly Generic Script

Again, few were expecting Red Notice to be anything but a fun riff on familiar espionage action-comedy tropes, but the script from director Rawson Marshall Thurber - previously responsible for Dodgeball, Central Intelligence, and Skyscraper - basically feels like a carbon copy of literally dozens of previous action-adventure films.

Indiana Jones and National Treasure are the most obvious touchstones, but even if you accept the film as an homage to these properties, almost every significant scene in the film feels cribbed from a prior, better one.

All the action and comedy beats are echoes of what we've seen in the genre for years, even decades: it's as though Thurber spent a month bingeing classic action-adventure flicks and then wrote his own script over a weekend.

There's scarcely an original bone in the entire movie's body, which while not the most egregious sin it could commit confirms its disappointing lack of imagination.

This is a film with very little personality of its own, dining out instead on the genre's existing successes.