"Always appreciate a quality double-cross."
Hello everyone!
The last non-Christmas blog post for this calendar year, as starting this Thursday we're heading straight into that extravaganza as soon as we can manage it!
Honestly, I'm a little bit excited, because I tend to enjoy the holiday related stuff I post on my blog over the month of December, and there's got to be some holly jolly on here, right? After all, there's so much other stuff going on it isn't even funny anymore.
So before we unveil what the first holiday-themed book is going to be, let's have one last look back at what people are saying was probably a fun movie for the most part.
And I mean, it was.
But I think my expectations were too high because I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I thought I would, in the end.
So let's roll in with Red Notice and see what it's about, shall we?
Links to other movies related to this blog post can be found at the bottom of the page, as usual!
Now, to the movie itself.
Red Notice stars Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds in an art heist that spans the globe and allows viewers to see just how far technology has come, given that the entirety of the movie was physically shot in Atlanta with the leads, and then the locations were added in through CGI and whatnot.
I'm not even kidding!
So our movie begins with a retelling of some Marc Anthony and Cleopatra stuff, wherein we learn that Cleopatra had three golden, bejeweled eggs, out of which two have since been found, but the third was lost to history. However, people have been looking for them since ... forever.
And that's when we make our first stop at Italy, where one of the eggs is on display, and Agent Hartley (Johnson) of the FBI arrives there with Interpol to make sure notorious art criminal Booth (Reynolds) doesn't steal it.
Turns out, the man's already switched the golden egg for a fake, and what ensues is the first action-packed chase of the movie, which I found hysterical because they not only utilize the physical differences between the actors (aka Reynolds bounces off a canvas roof while Johnson drops through it like a ... well, rock), but they also take the usual, jump-in-the-car-and-take-off scene and have the poor Porsche be T-boned by an old Gelato truck.
Priceless.
Interpol and Hartley catch up to Booth on Bali, however, and lock him up, but before Hartley can leave for the States again, the Interpol lady he'd been working with arrests HIM, too, because she suspects him of stealing that first egg for himself (spoiler alert, the Bishop took it back on Bali, we'll get to the Bishop in a second).
She then sticks him in the same Russian prison she put Booth, making them cellmates, and they end up visited by none other than Bishop (Gadot) who's got the first egg, is going for the second one which is in the possession of a man unoriginally renamed Sotto Voce, and wants Booth to give her the location of the third egg so that she can then deliver them as a gift to an Egyptian sheik's daughter for her wedding (the daughter's name is ALSO Cleopatra).
Booth says nope, Bishop has them both put on labor detail, and the two men plot together to escape the prison, which results in a home-made bomb out of soap, rocket launchers to get rid of Hartley on a bridge, and a helicopter dash away from the middle of nowhere mountain's they're on.
They fly to the party Sotto Voce's hosting, as he does every year, and work through their elaborate plan to get inside the man's tightly-locked vault where the egg is, but the Bishop is there too (enter a dance scene between Johnson and Gadot), and wouldn't you know it but a fight ensues in the vault between the trio.
Hartley breaks a glass display to grab a weapon, but Booth isn't strong enough, so again with the physical differences, though I will say that I think both actors agreed off-screen that Gadot, with her military background, would probably wipe the floor with them both.
Well, turns out she can do it in the movie too, revealing herself to be working WITH Sotto Voce once the man catches them, and then ends up torturing Hartley with electricity to get Booth to give them the location, which he does, somewhere in Egypt. Bishop then drugs Sotto Voce and waltzes out of there with egg number two, while Hartley and Booth end up in a matador arena arguing about whether Booth watched a nature documentary, or Jurassic Park with Jeff Goldblum.
Spoiler alert: it was Jurassic Park.
Spoiler alert number two: Booth didn't ACTUALLY give Bishop the location, but lied. See, his policeman dad ended up being someone he hated, because dear old dad was so obsessed with finding the lost Nazi treasures of WWII, and it turns out an old watch the man bought has the coordinates for something in the jungles of South America, which is naturally where they head on off to next.
What they find is a bunker that art historians the world over would literally kill to get their paws on, considering it supposedly holds all of Hitler's stolen treasures, but they're once again cornered by the Bishop ... and then cornered by the Interpol lady, who's been tailing them all through the movie because of tips the Bishop's been sending her all over.
A fight ensues (naturally) and then they take off in a race down old mining shafts, which reminds me STRONGLY of Fast and Furious 4, though they all end up in water afterwards, trying not to drown.
And also trying not to laugh at Booth's face when Hartley and Bishop kiss, revealing they've been playing him all along, and want the third egg for themselves, together. Both of them use the alias Bishop to confuse people, and now they have all three eggs since they take the last one that was found in the bunker from Booth, leaving him cuffed to a tree as they go.
The eggs sold, and the buyer double-crossed because, well, apparently they wanted the money but want the eggs to be safely stored somewhere? I'm not entirely sure behind this last logic, but the two can then be found on a boat off Sardinia six months later when Booth catches up to them, though why it took him so long I can't say since he never made it to the prison Interpol wanted to stick him in.
But anyway, he tells them he sold them out to Interpol, their assets are frozen, but the three of them could work together on another heist that needs three people to run successfully, and the couple end up agreeing, so Interpol misses them AGAIN by the time they get to that boat.
Meanwhile, Booth, Hartley and Bishop all walk into a crowd at the Louvre, probably to start whatever heist they've got planned next.
The end!
To say that this movie wasn't watchable would be a lie, but equally I can't say it was as good of a movie as everyone's making it out to be, and how it made it to Netflix's most watched is beyond my understanding. I'm not sure what went wrong, exactly, because Johnson and Gadot are wonderful, particularly Gadot, who I think enjoyed herself tremendously in this fun and sexy role.
It might have been Reynolds, actually, with jokes that were pushing the limit of when they were funny and when just plain annoying, but I can't be sure.
Either way, it's a fairly tried-and-true trope overall, I enjoyed the humour for the most part (the Johnson vs Reynolds comparisons will never get old), and it looks as though Netflix might be angling for a second movie, eventually.
But there's a couple of things that I didn't understand, though of those the most notable one would be Hartley actually giving himself and his game away much, much too early in the movie, when he says (about the Bishop): "How did she know this?" Or something along those lines.
See a problem with that sentence? I'll explain. The Bishop in the movie is never referred to by gender, which is why it makes sense for Johnson and Gadot's characters to be able to play them interchangeably. Hartley actually naming her gender should have tipped off Booth long, LONG before the actual reveal, because how does he know the Bishop is female, when no one else ever mentions any gender at all?
Ah well. It's either deliberate for the viewers to make the connection, or a mistake, but either way, this is an enjoyable movie to turn your brains off with for the hour and forty minutes it's running. It's not the best I've ever seen, and I actually liked Jungle Cruise a heck of a lot more than this, but I can't say I didn't laugh or like the bits of it I did.
Will I watch a second movie? Maybe. Depends on my mood.
But for now, make sure to roll all the way to the end of the credits, so you can hear Gadot's Bishop leave you a special message!
xx
*images and video not mine
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