Red

Red (2010) – AMK Hub. If you saw the word ‘Red’ used as a title of a film, and the film’s about spies and assassins, one guess you might have is that it’s a film about spies running about in the Cold War.

In fact; Red in this film stands for Retired and Extremely Dangerous. It’s a loose adoption of a comic book series of the same name about a former CIA black ops super-agent, Frank Moss (Bruce Willis) leading a lonely life of a retiree and trying to get into a relationship with pension agent Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker). Unfortunately, an old clandestine operation he was once involved resurfaces, and he – and Sarah – become targets of hit squads hired by persons wanting to clean up their past. Coming along for the ride are his former team mates: his mentor Joe (Morgan Freeman!), MI6 agent Victoria (Helen Mirren!), paranoid psycho Marvin (John Malkovich), and former Russian enemy agent Ivan (Brian Cox!).

There’re two themes in the film, which, interestingly, at this time of the year aren’t really that fresh anymore. One is the appearance of very many high-profile actors in the same adrenaline-charged film. We saw that just recently in The Expendables. The other is the hapless bystander civilian caught up with a super assassin-spy with other assassins all trying to kill him; and we saw that in Knight and Day.

Like those two films, there’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek moments; some that stem off the type of film genre Red falls into, and others from the fact that every one in the lead cast is an old veteran, and they all play retirees. The cast are clearly all having fun in their roles, though with the exception of Mirren and maybe Freeman, this new film they’re in isn’t really calling on them to do things they’re not already familiar with from other roles. Willis was one of the trio of action mega-stars in the 80s and 90s. Malkovich sees conspiracies at every corner, is continuously twitching, and has a hilarious whacked-out scene involving a plump woman assassin totting a rocket-propelled grenade. There’s a scene with Mirren going nuts with what looks like an M60 Machine Gun. As for Freeman who you’d think has done just about every kind of role – wait till you see him in the uniform of a Generalissimo from a banana republic!

Of the lot though, it’s Parker’s performance that I enjoyed the most. She’s an observer to much of the proceedings we see on screen, and gets the funniest lines, much of which she delivers with her characteristic monotone even when she’s not drugged.

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Funnily, as enjoyable as watching these A-list film actors is and that they’re clearly enjoying themselves, you can’t shake off the feeling that the film is calling them to do things they would never do. Part of it has to do with the fact that in Mirren and Freeman’s cases, we’re already so familiar with the kind of actor-defining roles they’ve been. Dame Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, and Freeman more recently as Nelson Mandela in Invictus. It’s quite a fetch to see them now here totting silencer guns, sniper rifles and machine guns.

The story is not only not extraordinary, it also suffers from obvious story loopholes which I suspect is the result of poor film editing. The most glaring of this occurs right at the end of the film where a character gets shot and seemingly dies, only to reappear quite alive at the corner of the screen just a minute later. Maybe the actor thought he was out of the camera frame.

Also, apart from watching A-list veterans do uncharacteristic things involving guns, and a scene involving Ross smoothly exiting a car and firing his sidearm at pursuing vehicles (amazing scene, but blue-screened I imagine), there just aren’t a lot of action scenes that you haven’t seen elsewhere before. Perhaps it’s in view that you just can’t exert the kind of physical demands on main cast actors whose average age is in the 60s.

Still… Ling loved the film and found it a ball of fun. I enjoyed it a lot myself, though not as much as Knight and Day. Still worth a watch.:)