‘Red Notice’ Trailer: Gal Gadot, Dwayne Johnson And Ryan Reynolds Provide Sex, Violence And Comedy

When you’re Netflix and spending around $200 million on a new action/heist caper starring Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds, you don’t take the opportunity to let these big-deal movie stars color outside the lines. At least that’s the impression offered up by the first trailer for Rawson Marshall Thurber’s Red Notice. At least as much as any early STX movie, the flick (originally intended as a theatrical Universal offering before they got jitters and Netflix grabbed the whole package) is selling big movie stars in exactly the kind of roles which made them stars in the first place.

The old-school biggie offers up Dwayne Johnson as the ripped and determined FBI agent who won’t let a little carnal interest get in the way of his collar. You’ve got Gal Gadot as the slippery jewel thief who may be a femme fatale or may be a more powerful crime boss. Ryan Reynolds is an unwilling participant, holding his own as an action sidekick and sarcastically pointing out the absurdities. That two of these folks are playing loose variations on their Fast & Furious characters while Reynolds goes “Van Wilder as international art thief highlights the “comfort watch” nature of this project.

Whether Universal ducked out because the movie was getting too expensive for a project that looks more like The Thomas Crown Affair than Hobbs & Shaw or whether they just didn’t like the script as much as the pitch, the film does look explicitly like a throwback to a generation or two ago when big movie stars in big-budget action/adventure comedies with a decent high concept was enough to get butts into theater seats. While the movie doesn’t seem all that spectacular, I liked Thurber’s Central Intelligence quite a bit and, because it’s a Netflix original, everyone is going to sample it anyway.

Red Notice debuts on the streaming giant on November 12, which now has zero major theatrical releases thanks to Ghostbusters: Afterlife moving to November 19 after Top Gun: Maverick fled to May 27, 2022. I was surprised last week that Netflix didn’t opt to give this one a brief theatrical window, but a week before November 12 would have been concurrent with the November 5 debut of Eternals. Still, even as a marketing gimmick, it wouldn’t be the worst idea for Netflix to fill what could be a big vacuum with a concurrent theatrical/streaming debut for this “like Hollywood used to make” would-be streaming tentpole.