An overly-convoluted heist flick from writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber, Red Notice relies on the odd-couple buddy-comedy interactions between smart-ass thief Nolan Booth (Ryan Reynolds) and FBI Agent John Hartley (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) forced to work together to beat another thief (Gal Gadot) from acquiring all three of Cleopatra’s legendary jeweled eggs while being chased by an agent of Interpol (Ritu Arya).
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Ryan Reynolds stars in this convoluted story of a time-traveler looking for a disruption in the timeline who travels back from 2050 to 2022 and is forced to work with his preteen self (Walker Scobell) to avoid other time travelers following him. The premise allows for an older and younger version of the same character on-screen, a very Disney Channel kind of tale, although the lengths the story goes to to explain and support this get unnecessarily complicated for the kind of film The Adam Project is in its willingness to both change time in very important ways and at the same time avoid other changes that its writers just decide shouldn’t be messed with.
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While you could certainly turn down some of the Deapool-esqe winking at the audience, and the plot is certainly not breaking the mold on the type of story we’ve seen done before, Free Guy is easily one of most fun movies of 2021. Ryan Reynolds stars as a non-player character in the world’s most popular video game who breaks outside of his programing and starts to become more than he was designed to be. What makes things work is Blue Shirt Guy, or simply Guy, is immensely likable. He’s just a good guy whose head has been turned by a beautiful girl (Jodie Comer) and begins making changes to his life that effect both the video game world and the perception of it in the real world.
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The sequel to 2013’s The Croods returns the cast of the original for a new adventure. The prehistoric family meet the more evolved Hope (Leslie Mann) an Phil Betterman (Peter Dinklage), friends of Guy’s (Ryan Reynolds) parents, who have created a safe zone that all the Croods except for Grug (Nicolas Cage) immediately fall in love with (although their hosts aren’t all that keen on their guests staying longterm).
The sequels offers much the same humor of the original with its conflict coming from the deepening relationship between Guy and Eep (Emma Stone) which threatens Grug’s pack and the Bettermans’ plan to steal Guy away from Eep for their daughter Dawn (Kelly Marie Tran). Eventually, danger will come to safe oasis and the two families will learn to work together.
There’s some fun here, I did appreciate the choice to make Eep and Dawn friends instead of rivals, but for all its wackiness there’s not much substance. The Croods: A New Age is a so-so sequel to a so-so film. Fans of the original will likely enjoy themselves, but the sequel doesn’t do much to evolve past the limited appeal of the original.
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Even for a Michael Bay film, 6 Underground is a dumb action flick which isn’t much more than problematic story used to tie together a series of impressive action sequences. Despite these limitations, the film offers some basic dumb fun largely due to a cast better than its source material and several lengthy stunts including parkour, magnets, car chases, guns, explosions, and lots of dead bodies.
Our heroes are a no-name team brought together by billionaire turned would-be savior (Ryan Reynolds) who operates a private group hoping to do good in the world by performing coup d’etat (apparently under the nose of every intelligence organization on the planet). His team includes a spy (Mélanie Laurent), hitman (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), acrobatic thief (Ben Hardy), doctor (Adria Arjona), driver (Dave Franco), and sniper (Corey Hawkins).
The group’s mission, what we’re told is the first of many, after a botched opening mission that left one of them dead, involves taking down a foreign head of state (Lior Raz) and replacing the dictator with his more moderate brother (Payman Maadi).
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