What does it take for a star to have sex appeal? Not to be sexy, but to have sex appeal? The line is thin, but definitive, the former evoking awe, the latter evoking desire. Red Notice starring three different strands of beauty — Ryan Reynolds' witty and irreverent cool with a pack of abs made conspicuous but its covering, The Rocks' rockish physique, and Gal Gadot's lithe, military lumbering — was a moment to reformulate sexy as sex. But alas, we get the fumbling fun of three adults who frolic across the globe — from Italy to Bali — in search of golden eggs, and who, despite being at their respective pinnacles of beauty, elicit nothing more than a stunned wondering of their gym regime.
To be clear, the fun is lathered throughout. There are chase sequences with a sweep that is thrilling — a camera that begins with a birds eye view and then swoops like an eagle onto the road following a car that is rushing towards a museum, till The Rock opens the door of said car, all in one take — and action choreography that makes you appreciate cinema for the labour that it is. There is an entire sequence on a scaffolding where Reynolds is pushing, kicking, and shoving the police as he is trying to exit the museum from where he stole one of three golden eggs that belonged to Cleopatra. At the end of that scene, all the scaffolding is one dusty pile of rubble. The thief has fled, successfully.
Reynolds plays an art thief, who is trying to be bested by another art thief played by Gal Gadot, while trying to slip from the grip of FBI's top profiler played by Dwayne Johnson (The Rock). The three eggs, if collected, need to be deposited in the hands of an Egyptian kingpin who wants to gift it for his daughter's wedding. (The daughter, as we'll find out, couldn't care less about the gold or the eggs) A handsome pay is promised to the thief who delivers. Reynolds and Gadot compete, with Johnson in tow. There is also Ritu Arya, a cop who always misses her chance of success by the breadth of a hair. Is she incompetent or unlucky? Both, I venture.
But what also connects the three of them, are their daddy issues. Reynolds and Johnson get moments of elaboration, while Gadot gets a sequence where she tries to explain her father to a therapist whom she has strapped to a seat. The emotional thrust of that moment is undone by the humour of it. That was a smart choice, because when the men start speaking of their fathers, I wanted to check out of the soapbox. They drone through dialogues with a dryness that comes from beauty that doesn't need to assert its presence. That they are there in the scene, standing, or jumping, or marinating in the acrobatic inventions of modern day cinema is enough. They don't need to be emotional actors, as well, right?
What the three have in abundance, though, is stellar comic timing. The stretches of humour, riffing, prodding, edging (not that edging), and throttling each other's advances, has a familiar quality, like you are watching staged interviews between friends turned foes or foes turned friends. Gadot smarting the two men each time, physically and intellectually, is a nice rewriting of the buddy movie. Of course she is dressed in heels and a black high slit dress while shouldering all pummels. Gadot makes it look like Kathak.
But what is the sum total of these small pleasures? The budget, between 160 and 200 million dollars, complicates this question even more. Is it worth the budget? You get a twist in the end which is not shocking, but neither is it predictable. You are not invited to go back through the movie and align it in the context of the "big reveal". It comes like a fleeting detail. Very much like this film itself, a fleeting detail of a day. Something happened. Then it ended. That's about it.