Her majesty the killer queen!

Rating: 7/10 (26 October 2010)

Helen Mirren doesn't appear till halfway through RED, playing an ex-MI6 assassin who still freelances and certainly demonstrates her skill with machine guns and grenade-launchers when the going gets tough. It's more than a little disconcerting to see an actress who not so long ago played Our Gracious Queen now out there as a rogue hitwoman!
The plot is not exactly loaded down with plausibility but the chases and shoot-outs come thick and fast, and it's clear that the cast are having fun and you find yourself going along with this, much as you do with the panto-style antics in the Pirates of the Caribbean series. Mary-Louise Parker as Bruce Willis's innocent-caught-up-in-mayhem girlfriend provides a neat focal point for the viewer. John Malkovich gives an eye-rolling performance much as he did in Con Air. Brian Cox's Russian spymaster belongs in Round the Horne! There's even a cameo from Ernest Borgnine (always find myself thinking of the famous Ethel Merman story about her 50-year-old you-know-what!), now a sprightly 93. Bullets fly like snowflakes in a blizzard but not too many people seem to get shot. There's no gore and a (very) welcome drought of profanity.
RED is not exactly up there with the best of the Jason Bourne franchise. In fact it's down there with some of the dafter Roger Moore Bonds, like Octopussy and A View to a Kill. But, like them, it's an easy movie to sit back and be carried away by. For us older viewers it seems to suggest that if Life didn't start at Forty, it maybe will at Sixty-Five!