Red Notice Review

Rawson Marshall Thurber's third film with Dwayne Johnson was a Universal project until Netflix took it over in July 2019, months before cameras rolled, and its cost climbed to a reported $200 million, the most Netflix had spent on a film until The Gray Man. Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot were paid $20 million apiece, and the money shows up as gloss: Rome, Bali, a Russian prison, a masquerade in Valencia and a Nazi bunker in the Argentine jungle, most of it shot in Atlanta, and it looks it.

Johnson plays the stoic FBI profiler, Reynolds runs his quip routine at full volume as the thief Nolan Booth, and Gadot, as the rival thief called the Bishop, is the only one who seems to enjoy the con. The script is a chain of reversals built so that each scene can be undone by the next, and by the third double-cross nothing carries weight. The one novelty is the FPV drone photography, which whips through the action in ways a crane cannot.

Critics were unkind, 37 on Metacritic, and Justin Chang called it a depressing reminder of what Hollywood considers original material. Viewers were not: it was Netflix's most watched film until KPop Demon Hunters passed it in 2025.