Red Notice Review: 5 Ups & 5 Downs

4. The Underwhelming Action Sequences

With a $200 million budget, it's absolutely reasonable to expect Red Notice to boast some top-drawer action sequences - after all, that's as expensive as the priciest comic book movies, and a good deal more costly than Dune, which was priced at an impressively modest $165 million.

Yet coming away from this film, it's hard to feel like that monstrous price tag was money entirely well-spent. Red Notice certainly touts a glossy aesthetic with elaborate visual effects, but the set-pieces feel strangely workmanlike, small-scale, and even quite forgettable.

From admittedly energetic foot chases to generic shootouts and an underwhelming final car chase through a mine, none of this boasts the big-budget impact you'd expect from such an exorbitantly-priced production.

One can only suspect that the three leads each took a sizeable chunk of the budget home to compensate for the lack of box office participation they could receive.

Further compounding the mediocre action is the frequently choppy editing, Thurber's slick coverage being regularly sliced up by jarring cuts which upset the viewer's spatial conception of a given scene.

In short, if you were hoping for set-pieces on the caliber of, say, a Fast and the Furious movie, you should drastically lower your expectations.