For the sake of clarification, the Bruce Willis action comedy RED is not about the color red, of which surprisingly little is seen for a movie with so much gunfire. It’s also not a remake of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Oscar-nominated 1994 film of the same name, though I doubt there’ll be much confusion between the two. RED, in this case, is an acronym for Retired-Extremely Dangerous, but it could just as easily stand for Relatively Entertaining but Dumb.
When a Bruce Willis movie comes out, one hopes for the greatness of Die Hard or Pulp Fiction and prays it’s not another forgettable waste of time like Hudson Hawk or Surrogates. Usually the results fall somewhere in between, such as his mediocrity from earlier this year, Cop Out. RED is down the middle of that same road, but it benefits from an eclectic supporting cast who all appear to be having fun with each other while blowing stuff up.
Bruce reaches once more into the barrel of cliché badass tough guy occupations (cop, off-duty cop, boxer, military officer, etc.) and draws “CIA operative” this time, specifically a former black-ops guy named Frank Moses, trying to enjoy retirement in the suburbs. If that’s not enough to generate eye-rolling right off the bat, his only relationship with any intimacy is regular phone conversations with Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), a romance-reading desk jockey who processes his pension checks at a government call center. I call baloney right there, because if you’ve ever had to call any government agency, you’re lucky to be connected with any human at all, much less the same human repeatedly. Furthermore, he deliberately tears up his checks just so he has an excuse to call her again–yeah, right. And when Frank’s suburban home is torn apart by a squadron of machine-gunners in the middle of the night with no reaction from any of his neighbors, well, if you haven’t suspended your disbelief by that point, you’ll just be miserable for the next two hours.
With the aid of some clever postcard-style animated transitions, Frank goes gallivanting across the country, first rescuing Sarah despite her objections, then dragging her along as he tracks down his former colleagues in covert operations–Morgan Freeman, woefully underused as a denizen of an old folks’ home; John Malkovich, who effortlessly plays the paranoid eccentric as he usually does; and Helen Mirren as a grande dame with a predilection for superior firepower. All the while, a young CIA upstart (Karl Urban) is hot on the trail of “old man” Moses and his aging cronies.
Throw in Brian Cox (the original Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter) as a silky smooth Russian, Richard Dreyfuss as a corrupt industrialist (is there any other kind in movies like this?), and a crowd-pleasing appearance by a great old man still kicking on big and small screens, Ernest Borgnine, and it’s easier to ignore the ridiculous plot details and just go along for the ride. There’s plenty of gunfire and explosions and car stunts, all wildly overblown but bloodlessly sanitized for your PG-13 protection, without any silly lingering over the resultant death and destruction. In fact, an assassination attempt becomes a central plot point, and the movie seems to encourage its audience to root for the assassination rather than against it. A moral gray area, certainly, but one the filmmakers hope we will ignore through our laughter.
And RED does have a lot of humor in it, especially in the line readings and facial expressions of Mary-Louise Parker and John Malkovich, although the film generates more chuckles than loud peals of laughter. Helen Mirren has some funny moments, too, but the best thing is seeing her toting some serious hardware. It’s difficult to watch her in this movie without thinking, “Hey, that’s Queen Elizabeth manning the machine-gun emplacement!” Mirren has such a lengthy and varied résumé that she can fit into this role like a satin glove, and for a woman her age she looks mighty hot–even hotter with large-caliber weaponry in her hands. Similarly, an amusing appearance by character actress Audrey Wasilewski means I can never see her again as Peggy Olson’s frumpy sister on Mad Men without picturing her with a shoulder-fired missile launcher.
RED is fun, frivolous, and, apart from the girls with guns, forgettable. If Bruce Willis hadn’t surrounded himself with so many interesting actors, it could have been a lot worse. So if you intend to spend green to see RED, I’ll wave a yellow flag–proceed with caution.