Hollywood Has Forgotten What a Good Action Movie Looks Like

[flikmovies]

If you assembled a focus group of frequent moviegoers and asked them to describe the elements of a good action film, they’d probably come up with something along the lines of Red Notice. The star-laden blockbuster, which is dropping on Netflix this week, features three A-list names, all in familiar roles: Dwayne Johnson as a tough FBI agent, Ryan Reynolds as a motormouthed art thief, and Gal Gadot as a mysterious criminal who forces the two men to team up against her. The work is complete with globe-trotting set pieces, self-aware jokes delivered straight to the camera, and constantly shifting loyalties as each character tries to stay ahead of the others on the quest for some glittery MacGuffin.
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Everything about Red Notice seems almost algorithmically determined, from the cast to the familiar tropes, so the association with Netflix, a company that prides itself on blending art and machine learning (at least in its recommendations), comes as no surprise. But this film was sought after by practically every major studio before a script even existed, based on its plot description and Johnson’s involvement alone. Netflix only later acquired the work, which was written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber. I went into my screening wondering what about that original pitch was scintillating enough to spark such a frenzied bidding war—did it offer some fresh take on the action film, for example? What I saw disappointed me: Red Notice is a glossy but empty product that indicates the extent of the genre’s current crisis.

Read: Dwayne Johnson misunderstands his own star appeal

That might seem like a dramatic pronouncement. Other types of movies, such as adult dramas and comedies, have started to vanish from big screens, but every week box offices are seemingly choked with blockbuster brawls. The genre has become essentially every studio’s economic powerhouse, resulting in uninspired predictability and heroes who are never actually in danger; the trashy artistry of 1980s and ’90s action classics is nothing more than a distant memory. Now many of the movies are tied to the same existing franchises (like James Bond or The Fast and the Furious), comic books, or video games. Johnson is one of the few stars who actually gets expensive, original action films made, but of late he’s tended toward disappointingly safe material. Red Notice is his most generic effort yet.