My quick rating - 6,6/10. $200 million budget to begin with, and now reports saying with all the pandemic difficulties they had, might have ended up closer to $300 million. I figured since right now, everyone is wondering who stole Vince's golden egg, I better get to my review. I will forewarn you that I do typically enjoy a good heist movie so one with the star power of this one already had my attention. Dwayne Johnson plays the FBI profiler tasked with nabbing wanted art thief Ryan Reynolds who is after the fabled Cleopatra's golden eggs. But in the course of capturing Reynolds the world's number one most wanted in the same business, Gal Gadot is a step ahead of them and looking for the same prize. As with any heist movie worth watching, there is a lot more going on than the obvious so when Johnson is framed for stealing the egg himself and not capturing Reynolds our unlikely partnership begins. Since the only logical place to harbor such terrible fugitives such as art thieves is some prison in the frozen tundra of Russia, the two of them are now cellmates. I guess the Rock wanted to up his mismatched buddy movie star power and stepped up from Kevin Hart. I am sure you can piece together their respective roles and the writers do a good job of making sure to play around with using each to their strong points. So Reynolds does his wisecracking to keep you entertained while Johnson gets his ass kicked by nearly everyone he meets throughout this movie, including Gadot. No, that isn't a typo and I am sure very much on purpose. Getting into something about going all over the world during a pandemic, it isn't going to happen as smoothly as expected. So it sounds strange but this is what cost them more than they imagined. Trying to make their on-location scenes look as though they were actually there. Sounds backward but the mixing of on and off locations and green screen ended up astronomically expensive. For the most part, it was pulled off well (at times the CGI was weak though, especially in an underground car chase) but as far as cities, they were animated to a tee. The action scenes are well done and due to the silly decisions made by characters at the right times, they go on longer than they needed to. This did lead to some pretty nice-looking scenes though, as ridiculous as the wrap-up may be. Gadot playing the villain worked I thought since she plays it so subtly and not your usual evil genius just an "I am just better than you, deal with it" character. They all play off of each other perfectly and never felt as though any one of them was stealing a scene. They all played off each other to keep things entertaining while also working their own agendas. Good humor mixed in with the fast-paced story made the 118 minutes fly by. Now, back to the budget. You have to wonder if that kind of money was spent, was it worth it? My answer is most likely NO. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit but after it was over and I was like "that was a pretty good flick" I thought, that is it? Good? I realized they hadn't presented me with something I could see watching over and over like other flicks with a fraction of the budget or actors. Yes there are twists that won't mean as much on a second viewing but they took the time to explain it all away, so rewatching it again to discover what you may have missed the first time is pointless (Sixth Sense didn't suffer from that, I wanted to go back and see why I didn't figure it out ahead of time) This just ended up being a fun ride and good all-around heist flick that had tons of top-notch talent in front and behind the camera that produced exactly what they set out. A great popcorn flick. Nothing more, or less.
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