Red

 Jesse Thompson

Movie Review: Red

            The film Red¸is very fun and entertaining as a lighthearted romp in to the world of retired spies and dangerous intrigue. The screenplay is solid, with its share of little surprises, and good dialog for a great cast of characters, it delivers with many excellent moments.  The film begins with the retired agent Frank Moses, floundering in his retirement and bored out of his mind. As Frank, Bruce Willis wins over the audience with just his little grins and menacing stares, he is very likeable in this role, similar in likability to his comedic parts in his earlier films the Whole Nine Yards, The Whole Ten Yards, albeit better here and never overplayed.
            The only form of meaningful human contact Frank engages in at the start of the film is with an IRS clerk named Sarah Ross, who is lonely herself and wishes for a more exciting life.  Frank purposefully tears up his retirement checks every month for the chance to talk with Sarah over the phone and they live out their unblossomed romance through sharing stories from cheesy romantic novels usually involving a secret agent character with each other. When they finally set a date to meet each other in person, Franks past comes back to take him out in the form of a full assassin hit squad sent to his house. Franks goes on the run to find out who is behind this new heat on his tail set on finishing him off. Worried that Sarah would be in danger from the frequency of their conversations and "the way he talked to her", he picks her up for the ride, to which she agrees with only a little ducktape assistance.

            Sarah is played by Mary Louise Parker from television's Weeds. She is good in the role, funny, naive, and likeable. Over the course of the film, she goes well from being comically freaked out about the situation and being kidnapped in lieu of her and Frank's first date to really digging the badass exciting aspect of being an accomplice to a fugitive hunted by the CIA. It nice to see her as an integral useful part, not just a simple dame in distress, in moments in the film when she helps Frank on his mission such as using her great listening and persuasion skills she picked up in her clerical job to gently extract information from the mother of a deceased journalist that found out the list of names, to which Frank belongs, who are now all dead or being hunted for witnessing a massacre in a Latin American village many years ago.

            As the pair makes their way closer to discovering the motives for coming after Frank and his old friends at this time, they meet up with the other retired members of his black ops team from back in the day. First there is Marvin, crazy highly paranoid insane genius subjected to secret daily doses of LSD for 26 years Marvin who makes his home hiding out in a Florida swamp in a bunker hidden cleverly beneath a junk car with a full decoy house above ground. John Malkovich is so funny in this role, and hams it up for all its worth. Even when he is a more silent character in moments in the film, if you notice the expressions on his face, it's enough to set you laughing and threaten to steal the scene from the characters with the lines. Morgan Freeman is solid in the role of noble old Joe, and Helen Mirren is awesome as the elegant ex spy Victoria. It's too cool watching Mirren wield high powered machine guns and sniper rifles with calculated finesse and dangerous accuracy. Brian Cox as the Russian embassy worker and ex cold war spy is another standout of the movie. He and Frank Moses rehash their longing for the good old days of the Cold War when there were rules to the game that professional assassins like themselves followed in an honorable fashion, instead of the craziness of the subsequent "wars on terror" and dirty government dealings similar to the conundrum they face in the movie. Karl Urban is also good as the decent CIA agent being played by the films villains for their own ends as the the young buck against Willis' grizzled veteran. Also the evil Vice President under the thumb of a powerful arms dealer played by Dr. Christian Troy of TV's nip tuck (Julian McMahon) is perfect in a bit role.

            In Red the director Robert Schwentke gets to work with a strong cast of old pros that are all great actors in their own regard. With perhaps only a little stronger direction, slightly polished script and a bit better of a job compositing its big explosion effects, Red may have been one of this year's better films.