Review

Review Date: 17-October-10
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Red (2010)

This has been the year of underdog renegades: The Losers, The A-Team, The Expendables, the dreamwalkers from Inception, and now the retirees from Red. Good times were had in more than one of these flicks, but only Red prompted me to wonder, Who's having more fun, the actors or the audience? Not that it matters — there's enough fun in this picture to go around. Red begins in the classic vein of boy meets girl, boy suggests first date, boy abducts girl and drives her 900 miles to New Orleans with duct tape over her mouth. The boy in this case (Bruce Willis) is a few years out of training pants (okay, close to 60) and just wants to get a life. The problem is, on the eve of his date a veritable phalanx of assassins invades his suburban home, and when he escapes he must (a) protect the potential girlfriend who is endangered by their association, and (b) find out who ordered him dead. How did he escape a dozen trained killers? Simple. He was once a superstar at the CIA.

The girl (Mary-Louise Parker) settles in for the wild ride after an initial period of shock. She has been suffering from chronic boredom, and besides, age has not diminished Willis' vigor or boyish charm. Even dialing down his smirk the actor makes a fetching hero. The movie's hook is the non-obsolescence that he represents. Motoring from New Orleans to New York and many points between, the fugitives enlist the aid of other long-in-the-tooth yet formidable ex-agents played by Morgan Freeman, Brian Cox, Helen Mirren, and, most memorably, John Malkovich, having a ball as a paranoid whose brain was fried by government experiments. I can't remember ever enjoying him so much.

Red's other hook is the violence, which is weapon-focused, largely bloodless, and occasionally fresh despite decades of choreographed combat. The geezer gang is hunted by a younger version of themselves (Karl Urban, acquitting himself nicely among august company), although as the plot thickens it leads to movers and shakers in Washington instead of grunts at the CIA. The story's inevitable burps in believability are excused by the don't-call-me-grandpa exuberance of it all and the exaggerations for comic effect (e.g., portraying the Russian spy office as a dimly lit concrete bunker with pools of water on the floor). Red liberally shares its cast's high humor and converts action-movie punch into a thumb-nosing at growing old.

Copyright © 2010 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.