RED: Retired, Extremely Dangerous
For some odd reason, 2010 was the year for movies about crack teams of highly-trained specialists. We had The Losers, The A-Team, and The Expendables. Now, here comes Red, which also fits into the subgenre of 'government operatives hunted down by their employers' along with Salt and Knight and Day.
Red is based on a three issue mini-series by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner that was published by Wildstorm, an imprint of DC Comics. The source material centered on a lone protagonist and was made of darker, more violent stuff. Jon & Eric Hoeber, who also adapted the graphic novel Whiteout, freely interpret the comic into a comedy-driven action romp.
Bruce Willis stars as Frank Moses, a former CIA assassin who has retired into a life of boring routine. He wakes up, eats his breakfast, and wheels out the garbage just like everyone else in his nondescript neighborhood. The sole bright spot of Frank's mundane existence are his flirty chats with Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), the service rep who handles his pension. Like Frank, Sarah is trapped in the rut of your average cubicle dweller. She finds excitement more in the idea of Frank than the man himself.
One day, a hit-squad riddles Frank's house with machine gun fire in the middle of the night. Frank dispatches them with cold-blooded efficiency and rescues Sarah from another team of assassins who have monitored his conversations. Now, Frank must track down his former colleagues to find out who wants him dead. First, there's Joe Matheson (Morgan Freeman), now residing in a nursing home and suffering from terminal liver cancer. Next is Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich), a conspiracy nut hiding out in the Florida swamps. He was fed a steady diet of LSD as part of a secret mind control experiment. Frank even turns to a former nemesis in Ivan Simanov (Brian Cox), a former Russian operative and one-time lover of the final member of the team, Victoria (Helen Mirren). An ex-MI6 agent, Victoria, now runs a bed and breakfast in Maryland.
The filmmakers didn't skimp on the supporting roles either, snagging an ensemble of talented actors to fill out the movie. Karl Urban plays William Cooper, the CIA agent tasked with capturing Frank and his comrades, with Rebecca Pidgeon as his hard-nosed supervisor and Julian McMahon as the vice-president. Richard Dreyfuss essentially reprises his role of Dick Cheney from Oliver Stone's W. as a crooked industrialist. The 93-year old Ernest Borgnine shows everybody how it's done as a records keeper for the CIA's dirtiest secrets.
Most of the actors play their roles broadly with Malkovich and Dreyfuss being the most over-the-top. You almost wish Dreyfuss had grown a handlebar mustache so you could watch him twirl it with villainous glee. In contrast, Willis is more laid back as the laconic Frank Moses. It's easy to imagine Moses as what John McClane would be like in his sunset years. His role in Red can also be seen as a meta comment on Willis's career as an action hero. At 55, Willis isn't quite ready to hand in his badge and gun, not when there's still ass kicking to do. Morgan Freeman (who could captivate an audience by reading the phone book) doesn't get nearly as much screen time, but makes the most of what little he has. Brian Cox affects a rather iffy Russian accent as a Cold War throwback.
Despite being a testosterone driven film, the best performances in Red belong to Mary-Louise Parker and Dame Helen Mirren. As the underwritten love interest, Parker displays deft comedic timing. Her best scenes are towards the beginning of the movie when she's kidnapped by Frank. Even with her hands bound and her mouth gagged, she manages to bring the funny, acting as the counterpoint to the sleepy eyed Willis. And what can you say about the ultra-classy Mirren? Her Victoria is like a cross between Emma Peel and Martha Stewart. She remains prim and proper as she fires a sniper rifle and throat punches people. How can anyone not delight in seeing Mirren decked out in an evening gown and combat boots while manning a .50 caliber machine gun bigger than she is?
The action is wildly cartoonish. A hand grenade is swatted away like a baseball and blows a henchman into pieces. Shortly afterwards, Malkovich deflects a rocket with a single bullet. It explodes in a massive ball of fire while Malkovich emerges without as much as a singed eyebrow. The film does peter out during a pedestrian and anticlimactic resolution, but rebounds with a hilarious epilogue.
Rating: ***
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