SAS: Red Notice (2021)

SAS: Red Notice arrives as a British action thriller of the sort that once filled shelves at rental shops and now gets deposited directly onto streaming services with a shrug. A private military contractor called Black Swans massacres a Georgian village to clear the way for a gas pipeline, earns itself a red notice, and then hijacks a train beneath the English Channel to demand half a billion dollars. Sam Heughan runs, shoots, and broods. Tom Wilkinson appears in his final screen role, lending the proceedings a dignity the script has not earned. The critics were unimpressed, and the critics were correct.

The cast is unusually varied for this corner of the genre. Ruby Rose, Hannah John-Kamen, Noel Clarke, Jing Lusi, and Ray Panthaki occupy the frame without anyone pausing to announce it. This is representation as furniture, present and unremarked. Grace Lewis, played by Rose, commands a mercenary outfit with genuine menace. Dr Sophie Hart refuses evacuation to tend to the hostages. Neither development carries an argument. The film has no thesis about gender, only a woman with a knife and a schedule. A similar restraint governs its politics. Britgaz, the prime minister, and the contractor all collude, and the collusion is exposed. The indictment is real but narrow, aimed at corruption instead of the economic order.

What the film declines to do proves more instructive than what it attempts. The pipeline is a ransom device, never an environmental one. The massacre is corporate malfeasance, never racial. There is no queer romance, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent character, no reworking of the historical record. Nobody lectures. The film wants to detonate a tunnel and get home in time for the credits, and it does precisely that. In an era of strenuous messaging, this is almost quaint. Almost.