Oct 25, 2010 18:31 GMT  ·  By

“I kill people, dear,” Helen Mirren’s Victoria says in the 2010 film “RED,” which stands for, Retired, Extremely Dangerous. In spy-talk, on a need-to-know basis, that’s almost all moviegoers need to know – and remember – before going in the theater to see it. Directed by Robert Schwentke (“Flightplan,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife”) on a script by Jon and Erich Hoeber, based on the graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner, “RED” boasts one of the most impressive casts to grace the silver screen in recent years.

Its style or approach may not be new (Stallone’s summer testosterone-packed “The Expendables” has been there, done that), but, for all its silliness, “RED” does stand out because it has an all-stellar cast and aims for giddiness, not smarts.

Bruce Willis is Frank Moses, a retired black-op CIA agent whose sole pleasure in life has come to be chatting on the phone with Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), the government official in charge of mailing his monthly pension check.

For the first few minutes, the film goes to painful lengths to show just how utterly boring – verging on despairingly so – the life of a retired CIA can be. Frank himself would have probably done something to end it had it not been for the warm-voiced Sarah.

Luckily, he gets the chance to meet her sooner than he thought, when a “wet team” breaks inside his house at night to end him. Him, being Bruce Willis and all, has no problem terminating the entire team in almost the blink of an eye.

As Frank sets out to reunite his old crew (old in more ways than one, as the viewer soon realizes), with the help of Sarah (kidnapping seems to have become the latest and hottest form of courtship in today’s action flicks), one also notes that “RED” plays out as a noisy affirmation of how age doesn’t really count.

As one reviewer puts it, young men kicking young men’s backside is fun, but older men (and women) doing so means double the fun.

And there’s plenty of that.

Morgan Freeman is Joe Matheson, one of the first former associates that Frank visits. Joe has Stage IV liver cancer and would give an arm and a leg for another shot at glory. Ogling nurses in the retirement home isn’t really all that’s cracked up to be.

John Malkovich is former spook Marvin Boggs, one of the few survivors of CIA’s mind-controlling experiments. He’s paranoid because of the drugs he was once forcefully fed but, for all it’s worth, his paranoia almost always serves him right.

Because one can’t have a spy movie (even a tongue-in-cheek one) without the Russian intel representative, there’s Brian Cox’s Ivan, a former spy who’s learned to work with the men he once considered enemies – for a price.

Ivan, it would seem, shares more with the retired gang than just the knack for killing and the adrenaline rush: and that something would be Victoria, played by the always sophisticated Dame Helen Mirren.

Victoria may look relatively harmless in her overstuffed living room, baking cookies and serving tea, but the MI6 agent in her is as restless as ever.

The team now reassembled – and officially retired from retirement – they set out to find out who wants them dead, and uncover a twisted plot that goes all the way up to the Vice President (Julian McMahon) and a defense contractor (Richard Dreyfuss) whose puppeteering sets everything in motion.

The plot is simplistic but, as also noted above, this isn’t a movie that aims to be smart. “RED” is painfully obvious in its attempt at being fun: mindless fun, sparkled with the occasional explosion and loud gag, with most of the latter provided by Parker’s character, the “newbie” Sarah.

Every scene seems to have been written specifically for the purpose of having these A-listers come in and do their stuff, whether it’s to drop hilarious one-liners (“Old man, my [expletive],” says Marvin right after blowing a CIA female agent to pieces) or heavy explosives.

In the end, everything works out just fine, even if there are many moments when the film seems in danger of crumbling under the sheer weight of so many clichés piled together. It never stops being fun, though.

Even if the viewer has to wait for about a full hour until Victoria makes her appearance, when she finally does so, almost all is forgiven: no woman (young or old) can look as good as Mirren in an evening gown while shooting a machine gun. She makes it all well worth it.

There’s lots of fun moments in “RED” but almost none matches those scenes in which Mirren shows them how it’s done. Her Victoria is so glamorously bad (in a good way) that it’s quite a shame that the film doesn’t offer her more onscreen time.

“RED” runs for 111 minutes, and is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action violence and brief strong language. It opened in the US on October 15, will reach Argentina and Germany on October 28, and conclude its run in Japan on January 29.


The Good

“RED” is fun from beginning to end. Though neither humanly possible nor believable, the film doesn’t fall a victim to its own plot for the simple reason that it never takes itself too seriously.

The Bad

In the context of hyperviolent comic books adaptations, “RED” stands out as the most stylish and sophisticated – therefore better – one. However, if one considers the impressive talent of all members of the cast, there’s a certain sense of shame: that they’d waste it on such a predictable, mindless film.

The Truth

“RED” is a silly movie that aims to be fun. In this sense, it more than delivers. It has a brilliant cast (who seem to be having fun mocking characters they’d already played in previous productions) and lots of well-done action scenes that will keep the adrenaline going.

Photo Gallery (10 Images)

Bruce Willis is Frank Moses in “RED”
The old gang of RED (Retired, Extremely Dangerous) agents is backFrank (Willis) and Sarah (Parker) make for a believable, albeit rather odd couple
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