Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/17/10
Unless Benjamin Button is
somewhere reading this, it's safe to say that none of us is getting any
younger and most of us aren't terribly happy about it. There are
compensations for aging, of course; experience really is a skill all its
own. But from the moment you pass the quarter-century mark, an ever-increasing
segment of the population is going to look down on you as “old” in one
way or another, and that's why the notion of “The Old Guys” coming back
to kick butt is one of Hollywood's most enduring fantasies. For this
task, Red assembles a first-rate team of actors whose ages range
from “a little old” to “pretty old” and even finds a role for that spry
90-something Ernest Borgnine. What these performers have in common
is the presence necessary to convince us they could tear your heart out
no matter how old they are, and the skill to build complete characters
out of just a few key moments. As such, Red, aided a skillfully
composed script by Jon and Erich Hoeber and Robert Schwentke's light directorial
touch, is a first-rate action flick that should delight even those too
young to know who the heck that Borgnine dude is.
Frank Moses (Bruce Willis)
is a former spy who's found absolutely nothing to occupy himself in retirement.
His primary recreational activity is finding excuses to call Sarah Ross
(Mary Louise Parker), who works at the company that processes his pension
checks, and strike up conversations. He's finally ready to take the
plunge and try meeting her face-to-face when a team of assassins shows
up at his house. If he's a target, that makes everyone else he knows
a target too, and so he races to Kansas City to save Sarah. Not surprisingly,
she doesn't buy his story and he has no choice but to kidnap her to stay
one step ahead of William Cooper (Karl Urban), the loving parent by night
and ruthless assassin by day who's the CIA's new version of Frank.
One by one, 80's-era black ops agents are being taken out, which means
to survive, Frank must reach out to old allies like Joe (Morgan Freeman),
Marvin (John Malkovich) and Victoria (Helen Mirren), and even his Russian
arch nemesis Ivan (Brian Cox). It'll take daring break-ins to the
Pentagon and the home of arms dealer Alexander Dunning (Richard Dreyfus)
to puzzle out a conspiracy that leads all the way to the White House, where
they all share a past link to Vice President Robert Stanton (Julian McMahon).
Like this Spring's The
Losers, Red (the title referring to a government designation
“Retired: Extremely Dangerous) is based on one of those action/espionage
DC comics I didn't know existed until they started making them into movies.
Both comics make excellent ensemble star vehicles, but Red is both
casting off a higher list of stars and working at a higher level of craft.
The Hoeber brothers atone for their dreadfully inert adaptation of the
crime comic Whiteout with a spirited screenplay
that knows just how to put action and characterization in the same scene
and keeps the plates spinning skillfully enough to keep the story's criminal
mastermind from being too obvious. Schwentke bounces back from the
Time Traveler's Wife debacle by showing
something we never knew the Flightplan director had: a cinematic
sense of humor. In fact, fun oozes from Red's every pore.
Unlike The Expendables, which sought to
demonstrate the the ages of its veteran protagonists were irrelevant, this
movie makes age vs. youth its central theme, hashing out on a very violent
and literal scale the struggle each generation faces when it's deemed ready
to be put out to pasture.
But one of the keys to its
success is that youth isn't just represented by some cocky fiend.
Cooper is a complex, multi-layered antagonist in the vein of The Fugitive's
Gerard, and the 38-year-old Urban isn't cast for the kind of generational
contrast a less nuanced film might have gone for. He's terrific in
the role, keeping up with his veteran co-stars and then some in a way that
cements last year's wonderful turn as Star Trek's
Dr. McCoy as the beginning of an exciting second act in the career of the
former B-movie thug. Also doing better work than you usually get
in his role is McMahon, who in just a few quick scenes invests the Vice
President with exactly the kind of “charismatic on the surface, vacant
and confused beneath” vibe one gets from real politicians.
While his presence in action
blockbusters has tended to ebb and flow over the years, Willis remains
as good at this as anyone, and he seems every bit as capable and deadly
at 55 as he ever has. Plus he strikes great hot and cold sparks with
Parker, who has probably never been as delightful as she is letting Sarah
become ever more thrilled to break up her mundane routing by getting shot
at. Freeman and Mirren have so much presence one never doubts their
lethal skills, and she has a great subplot romance with Cox, who embodies
everything 80's Russian movie spies stood for. But it's Malkovich
who steals the show as Marvin, who's never really recovered from the daily
doses of LSD he received as part of a top-secret experiment and takes relentless
precautions against satellites and black helicopters that would be insane
if satellites and black helicopters weren't always tracking him.
And, yes, 93-year-old Borgnine holds his own in a couple scenes as “Henry
the Records-Keeper”, but then why shouldn't he? The guy's got 4 movies
on IMDB that haven't even come out yet. I swear Quinton McHale will
bury us all...
The action and stunts are
first-rate (the bit where Frank gets out of a spinning car and walks away
shooting while the car just wizzes past him is a classic image):
this is probably the first Summit Entertainment release that's indistinguishable
from the high-end offerings of another major studio. Only fair, I
suppose that the company that made its name off the Twilight franchise
should offer something for the grown-ups out there as well. After
all, even the residents of Forks are getting older ever day. Well,
maybe not the vampires... |
