RED (Rob Schwenkte, 2010) - 2 stars

RED stars Bruce Willis as retired CIA analyst Frank Moses, now deemed Retired and Extremely Dangerous by his old employers, who now hunt for him and his old colleagues, played by Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren and John Malkovich, all during the first few days of Moses meeting the woman with whom he has fallen in love, Mark Louise Parker’s Pension Office customer service assistant Sarah.

Frankly, witnessing Dame Helen Mirren pulling the trigger on a semi automatic weapon, or John Malkovich screaming and chasing after agents with a bomb attached to his chest, is as soul destroying as it is hilarious. A high percentage of great actors and actresses get to certain age and start taking jobs that are far beneath them and this film just appears to be that gateway epitomized, the realisation that things for these four may never be the same again. Granted, it is not as black and white as that- Bruce Willis jumped the fence years ago with the likes of What Just Happened in 2007 and also Cop Out just months before RED, and this is not to say that we will never see Mirren at her best again, but with a collection of eleven Academy Award wins and nominations between just three of the four leads, this is a clear sign that the good days may well be over for this bunch. Throw 60’s and 70’s Hollywood heavyweights Ernest Borgnine and Richard Dreyfuss into the mix, and the outcome is a blatant list of aging, out of work ex-A-Listers attempting to ruin years of solid work and back catalogues.  

The fact is that this is not an exciting film. It is indeed amusing in places, mainly because of Mary Louise Parker’s deadpan comments, but the action is silly and incomparably ludicrous. I am, in particular, referring to Willis standing up out of a spinning car and the ease in which the characters can infiltrate CIA headquarters with the help of a little fancy dress. The heavily stylised cinematography and use of special effects is fairly mentionable, but I fear the mention should probably go to the artists of the graphic novel, which will in no doubt have been used as a pre-existing set of storyboards, a technique many lazy directors now fall back on with adaptations of this genre.

The makers were onto something, but took it too far. I would much rather have seen a film inspired by the graphic novel instead of based on it, one that tells the story of a retired CIA agent now trying to cope with pensions, dressing gowns and the woman on the end of the phone he has fallen in love with. The romance element between Willis and Parker is fun to watch, enticing and engaging, but unfortunately the action, which takes up most of the running time and energy of the film, is simply run of the mill stock action.

The result is not necessarily a bad film, just a highly disappointing one, which, in my eyes, is worse. Frank Moses and his crew may well be Retired and Extremely Dangerous, however the actors themselves, after this less than dangerous display, should seriously think about retiring before it gets too much worse.