Red Notice – Assignment 4 by Carson Dumais

I chose to write about the new Netflix movie “Red Notice” because it was a very action packed movie with many plot twists. I had already watched this movie prior to the assignment so I decided to rewatch it with mise en scene involved and it opened up my eyes. In this particular scene I noticed that the ecology had many different shades of grey and the whole scene was much darker in order to grasp a more intense/serious feeling as they were both trying to escape prison. I also noticed that many scenes in this movie including this one had many shots in which only showed the top half of their bodies and very rarely showed their full bodies. This is to make us focus on what their facial expressions are and what they are doing to fight back. The shots were also very quick and changed from Reynolds POV to The Rocks POV then to both together. This all happened so fast in order to help us get a sense of how fast pace this scene was supposed to feel. There were a lot of foot chases in the film but one in particular sequence “involved the F.B.I. profiler John Hartley (Dwayne Johnson) getting into a foot chase with the art thief Nolan Booth (Ryan Reynolds). The chase involves some creative use of scaffolding and some inventive reuse of locations (Via: NewYorkTimes). It constantly cut through many different hallways and was a very creative use of scaffolding that made me intrigued in the chase. Another very interesting fact was that there was a shot in the film in which used brand new technology which was supposedly never used in a movie before as it was just invented 6 weeks prior to the film. This new technology for “Red Notice allowed Thurber to fly the audience over a bridge and straight into an eye-level shot of Johnson as his Agent John Hartley character. From flight to the door to a museum, the camera never appears to cut, offering an added level of immersion for the audience. As Thurber explains it, the shot was made possible thanks to new technology (Via: comicbook)”. This is a perfect example as to how movies are always advancing, and new technology is always being made to enhance every movie.

The quality of violence was also very high in this scene as there was a bunch of blood and dead bodies all laid out around the jail cells as The Rock and Ryan Reynolds had knocked out or killed each one with many different weapons. These 2 seemed to have been given much stronger attributes then the rest of the guards as they were severely outnumbered but still easily killed or knocked them all out. Also, the master criminal in this movie was a woman and not a guy which was a great change to see as mostly all movies nowadays are male dominated (the head cop in this movie was also a woman).

Although I personally loved Red Notice as it had so many plot twists to keep you on the edge of your seat, Rotten Tomatoes only gave the movie a 39% which was really surprising to me. Another shocking fact is that in the box office, Red Notice is only estimated to have made 2 million dollars so far; This is much less than their budget as the budget was a whopping 200 million dollars. This movie shouldnt have any real-life consequences as it projected men and women equally but one thing in which the younger audience may take away from this movie is that lying is a good thing as it happened so much throughout the entire movie; In fact, the whole movie was basically a lie as we found out that The Rock was secretly working with The Bishop (the criminal) the entire movie.

(Also since this movie is so new there hasn’t been any scholarly articles on it yet, sorry!)

Sources

Davis, Brandon. “Netflix’s Red Notice Is First Movie to Ever Use This New Filmmaking Technology.” Movies, Comicbook.com, https://comicbook.com/movies/news/netflix-red-notice-drone-technology-director-interview/. 

Murphy, Mekado. “Watch Dwayne Johnson Chase Ryan Reynolds in ‘Red Notice’.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 20 Nov. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/movies/red-notice-clip.html. 

Vijaydas, Vaishnavi, and Name *. “Red Notice Ending Explained and a Sequel Is Most Likely Coming next Year.” Dominique Clare, 16 Nov. 2021, https://doms2cents.com/red-notice-ending-explained-and-a-sequel-is-most-likely-coming-next-year/.