Starts well, but soon loses it's way

Rating: 4/10 (23 May 2011)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is a man living a seemingly mundane life, until he finds a group of hired assassins trying to kill him. He then reveals himself as a retired killer, who's on a hit list with a group of other operatives, including Victoria (Helen Mirren), Mathison (Morgan Freeman) and Boggs (John Malkovich) after a mission in South America went wrong. Taking his new girlfriend hostage to keep her safe, the group get their first lead in a murdered journalist and find corruption leading up to the vice president.
This high profile action flick has received generally more favourable reviews from the critics. It opens well, setting the tone nicely for more of the same stuff through-out, which is just as well, because action is a genre that desperately needs something to come along and shake it up a bit. But somehow Red doesn't live up to this early promise, and emerges as another example of how the genre can't compare with the sort of classics it used to be known for (for this critic, anyway.) The story just feels really disjointed and hard to get into, not clever enough to be confusing, just...a bit of a mess, really. In the midst of this, it's hard to spot any really exciting action, which only serves to make the pace drag even more.
Cast wise, all of them are just working on the personas they're known for, and not to great effect. Willis should manage this sort of thing in his sleep, but here can't make his wise cracking hard man act stand out much, ditto Morgan Freeman, who's just softly spoken again, and wise cracking here and there, while Malkovich does his wacky eccentric thing to the most annoying effect he can. Only Mirren offers anything resembling class and gravitas, with her presence in the film. Generally a mess, this finds itself in the 'red' from very early on, and doesn't stray away from this. **