An unstoppably average actioner with misguided eyes on spawning sequels hijacks the streaming ranks

Sharing a name with Netflix’s biggest-ever original movie may have been a blessing in disguise for SAS: Red Notice, because it definitely can’t be ruled out that some people out there thought they were catching up with Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot, only to end up with Ruby Rose and Sam Heughan instead.

Hypothetical confusion aside, director Magnus Martens’s Sky Cinema exclusive did actually fare better among critics than its $200 million doppelganger, even if a 52 percent Rotten Tomatoes is hardly the most glowing of praise. It delivers exactly what you’d expect from the setup, with a surprisingly stacked supporting cast doing the heavy lifting required to sell the formulaic nature of it all.

Heughan’s elite military operative finds his wedding plans being disrupted when Rose’s band of hardened criminals hijack a train underneath the English Channel, with the situation alerting everyone from the people on the ground to those in the corridors of power. It’s a decent enough way to whittle away your time – even at an unnecessarily lengthy 123 minutes – with Prime Video subscribers evidently in agreement after Red Notice cracked the streamer’s worldwide watch-list, per FlixPatrol.

Andy Serkis, The Umbrella Academy‘s Tom Hopper, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Hannah John-Kamen, and Tom Wilkinson are just a few of the familiar faces on board, even if any talk of sequels that was happening around its initial March 2021 debut has gone completely silent for two years and counting. There are three books in author Andy McNab’s literary series that served as the inspiration, but it might just be a one-and-done exercise.