Movie Review: SAS: Red Notice: Much ado about nothing

“Psychopaths that can learn to love are even more rare than a black swan.”

I would’ve preferred the word “rarer” to “more rare”, but I suspect it’s too late to apply for the job of screenwriter to the movie “SAS: Red Notice”.

This is sad, as I could’ve helped the story by applying a full stop…at its beginning!

Instead, its story is punctuated by a series of exclamation marks which begin with mercenaries massacring a village in the Republic of Georgia.

Okay, you say? Vladimir Putin had to start somewhere?

Well, you’re wrong: this particular brand of villainy has not been perpetrated by that bald-headed excuse for a bad face day.

These villagers are killed because they refuse to accept a gas pipeline scheduled to pass through their village.

If Mukasa Mbidde lived in this village, his help would’ve been signal in ensuring the villagers did not kowtow to such poohoo.

Sadly, the man with a unibrow so thick that President Museveni could launch another bush war in it was not available.

As a result, more than 27 guns were used by a handful of guerrillas nicknamed the Swans to “clear” every villager in sight. Well, mostly.

William Lewis (Tom Wilkinson) and his daughter Grace Lewis (Ruby Rose), and his son, Oliver (Owain Yeoman) lead the charge in this massacre.

Grace, who looks like a boy Catholic priests would Cross swords over, orders: “kill the men and the boys. Let the women spread the fear.”

One woman, a Georgian girl actually, shoots a video of Grace blowing things up, burning homes and murdering innocents, and the video goes viral like an old Eddy Kenzo video.

Then Grace’s image fills English language newspapers Kenzo would need a translator to read.

The Swans are thus labeled terrorists and must be arrested for crimes against humanity. With a smoking gun caught on video, everyone from Oprah Winfrey to the British Government is after them.

Of course Oprah doesn’t feature in this movie, but we are pretty she would want to interview Grace about those Catholic priests.

Hounded out of their mansion in Hampstead, under a lobby of bullets, the Swans take over a Eurostar train and hold it to ransom under the English Channel.

They then demand that the UK Prime Minister (Ray Panthaki) acknowledge on Live TV that the British Government is behind the massacre in Georgia.

He has to be clear in his acknowledgement, they demand. This way, even Oprah will envy his screen time.

Then, when he is done with his 15 minutes of infamy, he must wire 500 million dollars into a Swans bank account.

If he doesn’t, Grace promises to release a video linking the UK Prime Minister to the Swans on all social media platforms. And possibly tag Oprah so that even Meghan Markle may share the video.

This would destroy the government, and possibly discomfit the head of state: the queen (stop cheering Meghan!)

The only person who can spare the government such blushes is a guy with a surname that would make the queen feel at home: Tom Buckingham (Sam Heughan).

Tom is a SAS operator.

If he was black and also your uncle, he’d be a sellout too.

Instead, he’s a patriot who is planning to propose to his girlfriend, Dr. Sophie Hart (Hannah John-Kamen).

Instead of flying to Paris for the proposal, however, they take the train.

The train they take, Whaddayaknow, happens to be the Eurostar the Swans have commandeered to force the Prime Minister to pay them the ransom, and clear their name.

After 203 minutes (the movie’s runtime), you’d wish the Swans had just cut the story short by asking Mukasa Mbidde to lend them his raised eyebrows in order to characterize how shockingly bad this movie is.