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SAS: Red Notice begins with a bunch of baddies known as The Black Swans – Grace Lewis (Ruby Rose – Resident Evil: The Final Chapter), brother Oliver (Owain Yeoman) and Dad William (Tom Wilkinson – Selma) – wiping out an entire village, in Georgia, so they can run a gas pipeline through it, to the financial benefit of Clements (Andy Serkis – Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker). They had planned to offer a load of cash to the villagers, but since the residents would rather fire their guns, it didn’t end well for them.
As such, the SAS want to take them out. After the operation, off-duty SAS bloke Tom Buckingham (Sam Heughan – most recently seen doing an appalling Paul Newman impression in To Olivia, neither looking nor sounding like the late actor) is off to Paris on the Eurostar with girlfriend Dr Sophie Hart (Hannah John-Kamen – The Stranger – in standard girlfriend role), wanting to propose to her, and Grace follows in disguise, which makes it sound like it’s going to turn into Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.
What follows is very cliched and predictable – for example, a baddie jerry-rigs a door closed with a rifle across the handles, random passengers are killed for no reason, there’s double-crossings, and a baddie takes refuge in the train’s toilet for a moment, so when the guard comes to ask for their ticket, they get killed and the door locked by said baddie so no-one spots the dead body.
Plus, Anne Reid (Kaleidoscope) plays is a train passenger who’s been married over 50 years, yet for some reason, her husband isn’t with her, so it wasn’t clear why she was even on there. Was it too hard to put her husband with her?
What we have in SAS: Red Notice is a film where the direction is bland, the writing is bland, and although I watched this from start to finish, I could’ve stopped this at any point and still not felt like I was missing out on anything new.
Well, it was worth putting up with for the lovely Jing Lusi (Pure) as Zada, the only other female in Grace’s team in the tunnel.
Given how this stars Ray Panthaki (Marcella, Away) as the Prime Minister, and was most likely filmed in 2020 before the pandemic, and perhaps continued during the summer when things opened up a bit, I’m thinking they’re expecting Chancellor Rishi Sunak will take over from Boris Johnson before long, even though both are Tories, and so are two cheeks of the same arse.
At almost two hours, it rambles on far too long, Tom Wilkinson does his usual crap US accent, and I wouldn’t have thought Andy McNab would put his name to an inferior product but… here we are.
There’s also a mid-credits scene which is as follows:
SAS: Red Notice is on Sky Cinema from Friday February 19th, but isn’t yet available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD.
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 119 minutes
Release date: March 12th 2021
Studio: Sky Cinema
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1
Rating: 3/10
Director: Magnus Martens
Producers: Laurence Malkin, Andy McNab, Joe Simpson
Screenplay: Laurence Malkin
Novel: Red Notice by Andy McNab
Music: Benji Merrison
Cast
Tom Buckingham: Sam Heughan
Dr Sophie Hart: Hannah John-Kamen
Grace Lewis: Ruby Rose
George Clements: Andy Serkis
Declan Smith: Tom Hopper
Oliver ‘Olly’ Lewis: Owain Yeoman
William Lewis: Tom Wilkinson
Prime Minister Atwood: Ray Panthaki
Colleen: Sarah Winter
Zada: Jing Lusi
Charlotte: Anne Reid
Major Bisset: Noel Clarke
Callum: Richard McCabe
Sir Charles Whiteside: Douglas Reith
Olivia: Caroline Boulton
News presenters: Ben Shephard, Jayne Secker, Gamal Fahnbulleh
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.