Red may be a smorgasbord of tired genre mash-ups, but they're mounted with such heedless glee and winking humor that the film's basic construction almost doesn't matter. While it blends elements of the "one last job" cliché with the "government-is-out-to-kill-me" formula, first and foremost the film is one of those old-guys-still-have-it movies, a particularly dangerous concept that could easily give way to goofy chuckles and icky sentimentality. But Red manages to avoid the pitfalls of its various genre trappings and focus almost entirely on kick-ass attitude.
Attitude is what drives this movie from its opening sequence -- in which star Bruce Willis, displaying that knowing smirk, sleepwalks through a hum-drum life as a retiree in suburban hell -- through to the turning point, where mysterious government agents violently encroach upon Willis's peaceful boredom, and he must go on a kitschy shoot-'em-up, blow-'em-up mission to find out why. The story is merely the clothesline upon which wisecracks and machine guns hang, a frustrating but necessary conduit from action sequence to action sequence. Such a strategy should be offensive to highfalutin critics like yours truly, but the film flaunts it with such infectious verve that only a hopeless curmudgeon would refuse to go along for the ride.
Willis plays Frank Moses, the mysteriously and incessantly targeted former black ops agent who is perfectly content living in a soulless suburban neighborhood and tearing up pension checks so he can call the sweet pension services representative, Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker) to request new ones, in a square-peg attempt to formulate some semblance of a relationship. When Frank is thrust back into action, he goes on a globe-trotting mission to discover how a target wound up on his back after years of retirement, one that leads him to reassemble his old team of lethal assassins. The motley crew consists of Joe (Morgan Freeman), who spends his days ogling nurses in a retirement home; Marvin (John Malkovich), whose paranoia is a result of years of government-run chemical therapy but whose many other quirks come naturally; and Victoria (Helen Mirren), who has carefully constructed her post-MI-6 persona as a refined British wallflower, but who admits she relishes the occasional contract kill to sate her appetite for action. Frank also brings would-be girlfriend Sarah along for the ride, in an effort to protect her from harm -- think of it as courting by kidnapping.
In the film's final two acts, it's all about action and attitude, stylized violence and winking humor. The high-octane proceedings are carried off with style but not inspiration by director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, The Time Traveler's Wife), who capably visualizes the storyboards but can't take the material to the next level in the way, say, Edgar Wright did with Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Similarly, the screenplay by siblings Jon and Erich Hoeber is solid in its old-guys-against-the-world concept but gets bogged down in its attempt to thicken the plot in the third act, when long expository soliloquies and hollow gun battles take the place of the character interaction that makes most of the film so entertaining.
Character is the film's top commodity, and each of its veteran stars relishes the opportunity to just kick back and have fun. Willis has always enjoyed adding playful humor to his standard action roles, and fits perfectly into this role. Freeman adds sass to his usual gravitas, Mirren enjoys poking fun at her regal image, and veterans like Brian Cox and Richard Dreyfuss pop up in supporting roles to add spice to the party. But the scene-stealing stars of the show are Malkovich and Parker, both of whom bring irresistibly charming pathos in completely unexpected ways. Parker is well-versed in the caustic humor of Weeds, but here she is brilliant as Willis' sweet, doe-eyed foil. Malkovich is pure quirky genius, and with this film and last week's Secretariat has put together the most entertaining two-week stretch of any actor this year.
Red, whether you realize it or not, is actually a comic book adaptation, optioned from Warren Ellis's 2009 DC graphic novel. The film version diverts from the source material on several key fronts: opening the story up to a larger ensemble rather than focusing solely on the Moses character, tamping down the book's brutal violence to a PG-13 level, and adding a thick layer of snarky humor, which is all but absent from the graphic novel. The changes all work for the movie, which chooses to abandon serious dread and simply let action and comedy blow the lid off the film canister.
