Fridae

RED is the second action comedy I’ve seen this year to use animated postcard intros, the last one being The Losers. It’s also probably the third action comedy this year to feature a premise where a secret agent falls in with a a clueless everywoman who is sucked into his world: what with Killers and Knight and Day already released this year. And it is the umpteenth action comedy since Mr and Mrs Smith to use the idea of secret agents enjoying domestic bliss. One can argue that at this point for this sub-genre that it’s really more about execution than originality any more.

The title RED stands for “Retired: Extremely Dangerous” and is the blanket category for the geriatric and late middle-aged secret agents that the film features as its leads. Bruce Willis is Frank Moses, who spends his retirement mainly in conversation with Sarah, the girl on the other end at the pension department call centre (Mary Louise Parker) and pores over romantic potboilers when unwanted attackers close in on his house. When he uncovers a conspiracy to dispatch him and Sarah and other buddies on the retiree list, he needs all the help from old friends he can get. These include Joe (Morgan Freeman), a rake in the fourth stage of liver cancer who might have been a Black Hipster Bond back in the day, Boggs (John Malkovich), a somewhat insane master of camouflage and victim of CIA experiments, Victoria (Helen Mirren), a coolly efficient sniper. And last but not least, Ivan (Brian Cox), a fellow shadow soldier from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Hot on their trail is William Cooper (Karl Urban), a young upstart at the CIA whose handlers are eager that he see through Moses’ extermination.

It’s a one-joke movie, whose one joke revolves around showing a bunch of old geezers go around kicking the asses of their younger counterparts, and for the most part carries it well. The celebration of pensioner power even stretches to the casting, in which the CIA records keeper is played by a frighteningly keen and hearty-looking Ernest Borgnine, all of 93 but looking 20 years younger. Borgnine in his youth played a character who committed suicide by jumping into a pit of wolves back in The Vikings (1958). Richard Dreyfuss also shows up in a cameo playing an arms dealer who’s a mix between Blackwater boss Erik Prince and Dick Cheney.

The main fault of its execution is in not going far enough in terms of its joke and feels too contemporary for its subject matter. The American (whose female lead calls to mind a younger version of Mirren’s character in this film anyway) went far enough to evoke 70s Eurothrillers by being shot like a 70s Eurothriller: with its careful compositions, emphasis on suspense over action, and being stylish but low-key. Such a style might have better evoked the characters in this film by hinting at the sort of characters they might have been in their prime (one does sees them dining with Connery-era Bond or Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer.)

Instead, RED is shot like a contemporary action film with all the bells and whistles, where for the most part action setpieces consist of combatants unimaginatively blazing away at each other rather than any careful buildups of suspense. Character development is nowhere as sharp as it should be, and obligatory digs tossed at the military industrial complex and the idea of secret agents being little more than pawns in the hands of craven politicians fail to hit the mark or make an impact. It’s an efficient enough thriller, but one where everything is just so on autopilot that at the end of the day, you’d wish it tried harder for better laughs and thrills with the talent involved.