One can detect the literary qualities of SAS: Red Notice, screenwriter Laurence Malkin’s adaptation of the novel Red Notice, which was positioned as the first of a self-contained trilogy of novels from author Andy McNab that follow the exploits and escapades of government agent Tom Buckingham. The plot is the stuff of such espionage literature, in which Buckingham attempts to thwart an act of terror on a train, planned by the terrorists as revenge against the British government for thwarting another attack that went awry. The hero is one of those quintessential action-movie heroes — stoic, purposeful, vaguely skilled — and the villain is exactly the kind of psychopathic, uncomplicated menace that one loves to hate.
If everything essentially clicks, then why doesn’t Malkin and director Magnus Martens’ film work? That can possibly be boiled down to a general sense of having seen this type of plot before and accomplished under more capable hands. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with Martens’ take on this material, but what has been done won’t hold anyone’s interest beyond its inevitable sequences of explosion-and-gunplay-driven spectacle. Once the train gets rolling — to employ a grotesquely on-the-nose pun — there is only one destination here.
The film’s version of Buckingham is played by Sam Heughan as exactly the kind of stoic hero one imagines the character in the novels to be. This is to say that Heughan is good enough in the role without fully committing to the idea that Buckingham is a genuinely interesting character. Buckingham finds himself on the Eurostar train, which runs below the English Channel and connects the United Kingdom to the European mainland, laden with explosives when Grace (Ruby Rose) and Oliver Lewis (Owain Yeoman) — sibling American terrorists and the children of expatriate William Lewis (Tom Wilkinson) — threaten to destroy it.
That is essentially the extent of the plot, in which Buckingham and his doctor girlfriend Sophie (Hannah John-Kamen) are trapped on the train and the Prime Minister (Ray Panthaki) sends in a military response unit led by Clements (Andy Serkis) to diffuse the situation. First, of course, there is the negotiation period, in which the corruption of certain high-ranking officials rubs up against Grace’s utter disregard for diplomacy. Then, the crap hits the fan when the presence of Buckingham, who left the same response unit in disgrace, goes unnoticed by the brother and sister until a hostage situation develops.
There is no deeper level to SAS: Red Notice, and while one could argue that the film doesn’t really need one — operating, as it does, as a basically competent action thriller — it would certainly be nice if the film wasn’t so obviously thoughtless in its handling of the characters and situations. The streamlined nature of how everything happens here is appreciated, but the gaps in narrative logic and the ignorance of regular logic by seemingly intelligent characters are far less easy to forgive or overlook. By the time one gets to a series of fake-out, “are they dead or not”-type twists of the expectations and an overly sappy denouement that only inspires groans, the solid setup has been undermined.
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