Helen Mirren goes to another, hotter, more awesome place in "Red."
(Robert Schwentke, 2010)
October 15, 2010
by Joel Crary
“Red” is scattered, clichéd, lazy, and kind of fun. Let me put it this way: In this movie, you’ll see Helen Mirren mow down CIA operatives with a great big gun. It’s exhilarating to watch her go to another place when the moment calls for violence. In one scene, her character Victoria is keeping an eye out with Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), who’s new to the whole mercenary thing. Victoria tells her about a relationship she had with a man from MI6, whom her superiors told her needed rubbing out. What did she do? “I put three bullets into his chest,” Mirren deadpans, shooting a stone-cold squint into her rifle scope.
That character deserves her own film. Instead, “Red” is mostly about Frank Moses, played by Bruce Willis, who’s played this role a hundred times and under sillier names. The difference, I guess, is that this time he’s old – a whopping 55, which the film is desperate to convince us makes John McClane in the last “Die Hard” flick look like Justin Bieber. Calling Willis “grandpa” is still a bit of a stretch, though. Willis is slightly wrinklier than he used to be, sure, but he can still believably take Karl Urban in a fight.
Well, it’s more of a draw. Urban plays Agent William Cooper, who wants Moses dead, apparently under orders from the Vice President himself. That would be a fictional-world vice president and not Joe Biden, who may gaff a fair share but probably doesn’t harbour a poisonous vendetta against Guatemala. (Though Cooper’s connections to a contractor played by Richard Dreyfuss, who recently played Dick Cheney, are more than a tad suspect.) Moses is blissfully unaware of all this, collecting (but not cashing) pension cheques, flirting with Sarah the pension department operator on the phone, getting antsy in Retirement but remaining Extremely Dangerous.
A swarm of black ops descend on Moses’ suburban home with machine guns blazing, and “Mythbusters” could devote a segment to Moses’ retaliation. Hell, there’s a whole episode worth of stuff here – shooting a rocket dead centre with a magnum after it’s been shot from a rocket launcher, destroying a house with gunfire alone, hitting a grenade like it’s a baseball in order to blow up the guy who tossed it. It’s all silly, of course, and the action sequences provide most of the film’s laughs. The rest of the material, a cross between “Knight and Day“‘s action romcom bits and the penchant of “The Expendables” to blow things up, shoots for ha-ha funny. But once you’ve seen one bit about old guys being too old for this shit, you’ve seen them all.
“Red” never quite fires on all cylinders, but the pedigree of its cast does tend to escalate things a twinge. Moses gets help from former trenchmate Joe Matheson. He’s played by Morgan Freeman, who at one point impersonates an African political figure at about a 2 on the Mandela scale. John Malkovich plays Marvin, a former guinea pig for the government, whose repeated exposure to LSD has left him behaving like John Malkovich. Dreyfuss and Ernest Borgnine both poke their heads in for a couple of amusing moments apiece. The Parker character is in the middle of the mayhem, growing to love it as she grows to love the Willis character. And then there’s failsafe Brian Cox, who should be in the ads with the rest of them, giving a scene-chewing performance as a Russian agent.
Mirren definitely stands out, since her presence is the most ironic and fresh, though she’s painfully relegated to the movie’s second half. The plot serves as an excuse for great actors to play with cheesy action fare. If only it were written better – screenwriters John and Eric Hoeber base their film on the graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, but they’re under the misapprehension that it’s original enough to be justified entirely by the talent on hand. Director Robert Schwentke starts things off with a few flourishes, but quickly lets things become pedestrian. “Red” is the latest in a string of these codger-studded action flicks, which have now probably said all they need to say. We get it. They’re old, ornery, and packing artillery. Next.
