The title of Robert Schwentke’s new geriatric action film, RED, is enough to produce a collective groan: “retired and extremely dangerous.” It sounds like the punch line in a Saturday Night Live skit, a joke that produces the idea for a film about aging spies that gets as old as its protagonists in about five minutes. But there is something surprisingly endearing about this action send-up (loosely based on a comic book series) that stars a handful of brilliant actors – John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, and Helen Mirren – as well as the godfather of contemporary action flicks himself, Bruce Willis. It is a movie that gets its own tone exactly right: it winks and laughs, blows a lot of things up, and catches a hint of the melancholy of aging, enough to make this refreshingly insincere action thriller beat with a mature heart.
Willis is Frank Moses, a former top level secret agent with the CIA, who is now retired and living alone on a non-descript suburban street. When he receives his pension checks, he tears them up as an excuse to call Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker), a government clerk who reorders Frank’s checks but not until after they chat flirtatiously about life and romance novels. Although the filmmaker’s tongue seems always near his cheek, these early scenes establish a picture of aimless retirement life. It is a down-tone that is literally blown to smithereens a few minutes later when Frank’s house is mysteriously attacked by a dozen men in black jump suits with automatic weapons. Frank scurries to his basement where he removes a panel in the floor, pulling out weapons, passports, and other spy paraphernalia. Not many people would welcome a middle-of-the-night assault on their house. For Frank, the bullets come as a relief.
This is the ongoing joke in RED, that Frank and his former colleagues all live unable to adjust to the “normalcy” of retirement, with part of them forever lost to the romance of the past. Morgan Freeman is Joe Matheson, who lives in a nursing home and is battling liver cancer, but still has the wits to trick his nurses into bending over to fix the television. John Malkovich is Marvin Boggs, a half-crazy eccentric recluse who was supposedly drugged by the government for over a decade with repeated doses of LSD. He is paranoid and erratic, but a sure shot. Then there’s Victoria (Helen Mirren), who seems to have settled into a comfortable Martha Stewart existence, but only needs to feel the steel handle of a weapon in her hands to become the gritty killer she was during her years with MI6.
In an unapologetically cheesy action storyline, it turns out Frank is being hunted by the CIA because of his involvement with a covert operation in the 1980s in Guatemala that rescued a soldier who is now vice president of the United States. The VP wants to cover up war crimes he committed, and so has ordered all the agents involved in the operation killed. Frank won’t go down so easily, and he saddles up his old friends to fight back. And fight they do. RED’s humor and honest depictions of elderly malaise ring true, but the movie’s real strength is in its action sequences. Whether they are raiding a weapons smuggler’s house or staging an elaborate assassination attempt on the vice president, RED’s heroes possess a springy youth. And it really is hard to see Helen Mirren in quite the same way after watching her with two hands on a tripod mounted machine gun, blowing thousands of rounds through cars in a parking lot. It just may be the hottest thing you see in the theaters all year.
Photo: Frank Masi © 2010 Summit Entertainment, LLC
