SAS: Red Notice

They can switch on a dime from a cold, calculating killing machine to a methodical, observant tactician. At least, that’s how the film portrays the condition.

Several hallmarks of psychopathy are presented in the film – such as an inability to distinguish right from wrong, the tendency to lie (often), behaviors that conflict with accepted social norms, and difficulty in showing remorse or empathy. How SAS: Red Notice plays with these traits and symptoms through the characters of Tom Buckingham (Sam Heughan) and Grace Lewis (Ruby Rose) is quite a fascinating study of psychopathy – from a film’s perspective. It doesn’t delve into the four observed subtypes of psychopathy. There’s simply not enough time. Still, it takes time to lay the foundation for the story it intended to weave. This is a battle between two psychopaths with diverging viewpoints. That they would trade blows with one another in more ways than one is simply par for the course.

We begin with William Lewis (Tom Wilkinson), an expat from the United States living in London who oversees a family-run private military contracting outfit that the British government has secretly been employing to do its dirty work for them. He, like his daughter Grace, is a psychopath, and it is implied that this is how their operation has been so successful. On the other hand, Oliver Lewis (Owain Yeoman) lacks this “benefit”. He has struggled to impress his father over the years. How his emotions impact his decision-making process seems to be at the core of this lack of confidence. With their entire organization in tow in the Republic of Georgia at the behest of SAS Commander George Clements (Andy Serkis), they are clearing villages to pave the way for a gas pipeline through a critical geographical corridor. When money proves an ineffective tool to get the peasants to leave, and their desire to fight for their homeland incurs the displeasure of the Black Swans, the village is torched. Every man and boy is killed, with only the women and girls allowed to survive. If not for one brave woman’s cellphone footage, they would have gotten away cleanly with their war crime.

Atwood (Ray Panthaki), the current Prime Minister for the United Kingdom, is less than pleased with this development and is ready to wipe his hands clean of the entire outfit. Having expected this, the Lewis’ have all sorts of contingency plans in place to get their revenge, even if they don’t plan to make it out of their English country manor. Their dedication and single-mindedness might have won them the day without any casualties despite the simulations of their plan consistently resulting in a total party kill. At least, it would have if they hadn’t coincidentally run afoul of one Tom Buckingham.

On the other side is our handsome protagonist, who walks through life attempting to emulate the emotions of those around him to meet their expectations. He plans to propose to his girlfriend, Sophie Hart (Hannah John-Kamen). Still, from their first interaction, we can see the cracks in their relationship. Tom has gone around Sophie to schedule a flight to Paris for the two of them by speaking to one of her coworkers to rearrange her schedule without her knowledge or permission (just one of those pesky hallmarks). He can’t understand her frustration at this invasion of privacy, viewing it as expeditious. Without psychopathy having been explained from the opening narration, viewers might typically chalk this up to a rich boy pulling the strings in his relationship with a woman of lesser financial means. After all, what’s work to a guy who owns the X-Mansion think about work? Englefield House stands in for the Buckingham’s ancestral home. It can be seen in X-Men: First Class, as Auradon Prep in the Descendants trilogy, and more recently as the Baroness’ home in Cruella.

Still, Tom is determined to hang onto his relationship with Sophie, even as he questions whether or not he loves her. He speaks candidly with his family’s butler, Callum (Richard McCabe), regarding his grandmother and grandfather’s relationship. Callum gently explains that Tom’s grandmother loved her husband “in her own way,” making it all the more straightforward that Tom inherited his psychopathy. He also gets gentle ribbing from his best friend and coworker, Sgt. Declan Smith (Tom Hopper). The two are close enough that Declan occasionally sleeps on Tom’s couch, and Tom goes out of his way to save Declan from a grenade early into the film’s second act. Declan is also the person that Tom trusts the most to pass critical information to throughout the film, especially as he is benched by his superiors for executing somebody about to blow him and Declan up.

The relationship between Tom and Sophie is central to the film’s story. Love is often viewed as a significant weakness by villains across all types of stories – especially regarding the hero. When you care about somebody, they can be used against you, damaging your critical thinking ability and limiting your options in a dangerous scenario. This is a plot point we repeatedly see in stories – Gwen Stacy is a famous example.

Part of Sophie’s concern with her relationship with Tom is phenomenally expressed when they speak on the train shortly before all hell breaks loose. She has been attempting to ask Tom how he feels about having killed the Grace Lewis imposter. While he is not unwilling to answer, those that he provides are rather evasive. Primarily, this is because he doesn’t care one way or the other that he’s taken another person’s life. In his mind, it was kill or be killed, and he chose the former. To this end, when he points out that the imposter had a weapon aimed at him, Sophie asks if he would shoot her if she had a gun pointed at him. His evasive response was about staying on her good side, which did not answer her question. Later on, we get an honest answer. Grace has Sophie at gunpoint, and Tom has Oliver at gunpoint – Grace simply shoots her brother. At the same time, Tom hesitates to do the same but appears as if he will, making Sophie momentarily incredulous. Yet, when it came down to it, his first thought was to intercede long enough to give Sophie a chance to flee the scene.

At the same time, it is evident that Tom and Sophie understand one another. Throughout this tense, traumatic situation, both are clear-headed enough to make sound decisions – even if staying behind feels a bit idiotic, it saves more people than it kills. When Sophie is captured, and Grace attempts to lure Tom into a trap, her lack of knowledge of Sophie’s personality spells it out crystal clear to Tom that he is walking into a trap. He goes, anyway, because of his feelings for Sophie. Sophie, meanwhile, understands what Tom is capable of, even if she has never seen him in action firsthand. She is the one who convinces Tom to knock her out, all to sell the escape of one girl better, and Tom acts without hesitation.

Andy Serkis and Tom Hopper spend much of the film waiting around, as they aren’t on the train while it is being controlled by the Black Swans. But they don’t waste their presence in the least. Andy Serkis is renowned for his bombastic performances, such as Ulysses Klaue from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, if not for his motion capture performances like Caeser and Gollum. Tom Hopper bounced from genre to genre before finding his place in The Umbrella Academy, where he indeed grew into his own as an actor. Here, he has the distinct honor of having a darker side to his character, one that is not played for laughs like poor Dickon Tarly in Game of Thrones.

For the Black Swans, most of them are barely given any attention outside of William, Grace, and Oliver. The only one who had any presence was Zada (Jing Lusi), the only female Black Swan with any prominence. She is their resident hacker and is the only one who seems to have any characterization. The others, if they had names, were so inconsequential that those who survived them didn’t even mourn their deaths. Perhaps there were more psychopaths than we were told about.

Throughout its runtime, Sam Heughan and Ruby Rose are really able to prove why they are fun to watch. They execute numerous fight scenes, whether through the exchange of gunfire, visceral knife fights, or creative uses of incendiary devices. Each of them draws similar parallels to their previous work that I enjoyed, The Spy Who Dumped Me for Heughan and John Wick: Chapter 2 for Rose. They were equally dangerous characters in those films. Is it any wonder that they continue to blaze a trail for themselves?

SAS: Red Notice was a fun ride with a strong cast and an exciting story. With three books in total, it’s possible there could be a sequel, but the film stands strong enough on its own to be a standalone. Sometimes, that’s for the best.