Red Notice (2021)

For the crime of Grand Larceny of the story lines of other adventure films.

We watched this film last night on Netflix, as most television channels were featuring either college football or Hallmark Christmas movies. Yes, it was diverting, and yes, because of Ryan Reynolds motormouth delivery of dialogue, it was funny. But it was also derivative of films from the past.

There is a sequence when the two men were walking down the stairs to a mine that was hiding Nazi treasures when Reynold’s character starting humming the theme to “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I knew that was a given, so the acknowledgement redeemed the film, slightly, in my eyes.

(Because I had just finished Len Deighton’s XPD last week, the premise of hidden Nazi treasure in a mine was still on my mind.)

Even the race through the mine’s lanes on a 1936 Mercedes-Benz 540K was reminiscent of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”

Maybe I’m jaded. Maybe I’m old. It’s just that my memory is too long to ignore obvious homages to our past. Does that make this film bad? Not really. But the crime of ‘borrowing’ from so many old films is nothing new, is it? No one seems to have an ‘original’ thought these days.

And there were touches of James Bond, too. I guess we were supposed to Notice the Red connections.