Review of The Red Sea Diving Resort

Whether this is propaganda or not I'll leave you to decide but clearly the 10 ratings and 1 ratings are political statements. At 2 hours plus the film is too long with a lot of filler which does mean it drags a bit and the negatives outweigh the positives. The biggest negative is the cliche riddled script which offers no depth of character or opportunity to develop and is made worse by the quite wooden direction. As a result the acting talents of such as Chris Evans, Alessandro Nivola, Haley Bennett, Michiel Huisman, and Alex Hassell are wasted; only Gregg Kinnear and Ben Kingsley manage to do anything with their peripheral roles. Another negative, which we really shouldn't see these days, was the negative cultural tropes of the corrupt African politician and the homicidal war lord, cheap shots. The film also fails completely to give the audience any sense of what is going on in the region and why, instead we have a simplistic these are the good guys and these are the bad guys approach which is frankly insulting. As the film plods along there are a number of scenes that grate but here are a couple; in a strict Muslim country which is enforcing religious conformity the Haley Bennett character never covers up even when bursting into the office of the corrupt politician to plead for Chris Evans life, in the final showdown between Evans and the warlord at the hotel there are guests eating dinner around them who a) don't react at all to the guns and Evans being clubbed to the ground and b) have miraculously disappeared a few hours later when the agents decide to flee the place with 400 refugees they hid in one room! There are a few positives but only a few; in a rare scene of acting depth Evans and Nivola do manage to convey some emotion in their prison scene and the final race for the CIA aircraft that will take them all to safety does have a convincing energy that the film as a whole lacks. So a very average watch and unfortunately this is now becoming my expectation for Netflix films, perhaps less quantity and more quality should be their way forward?