Hostility Towards and Mistrust of Halfway-Decent Storytelling Sense, Smart Moviegoers and the Slightest Investment of Any Aesthetic Value

Rating: 1/10 (29 October 2010)

RED features noteworthy stars doing things we wish were worthy of any note. Indeed the star turns are this eye roll-inducing cash-in's wrongfully perceived validation, with the mugging performances filling the void of any remotely believable dramatic tension. Despite all four Oscar winners, cumbersome, gleaming, brainless RED has almost nothing going for it apart from its own squandering, mockingly contemptuous wastefulness.
Bruce Willis stars in this anti-brain waste of talent, which refers to his alert level, "retired: extremely dangerous." Clever, I guess. He's ex-CIA, black ops, who finds out bad guys want to kill him. So he musters the members of his old killing squad, and they shoot and blow things up. Actually, not so much that as firing lots of bullets in the general directions of other people, and blowing them up. The lineup features Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren and Brian Cox. And the black affiliate must die first, "because that's how he would have wanted it." So once more poor Morgan Freeman is squandered.
Besides his old buddies, Bruce takes along Mary-Louise Parker, a telephone operator at the agency that manages his pension. He's fallen in love with her voice. He says she has to go on the run with him because her life is in danger. Of course. Her life will be much safer with the target of thousands of rounds of automatic weapon fire. The villains in thrillers couldn't play Duck Shot on Atari. And the good guys are only any better because the screenwriter is the god exercising deus ex machina for your viewing pleasure, not because they've endowed their characters with any brains or inner life to speak of.
This celluloid vacuum isn't even close to as skillful as it acts like it is. It runs out of steam not even 15 minutes in and begins repeating itself, and the deficiency of a persuasive plot thread doesn't alleviate this syndrome. The film's over-the-topness does not excuse unanswered questions like why not a single neighbor not only looks outside or calls the police but even turns on their lights after Willis' house is completely destroyed by an entire tactical team armed with machine guns they unload various times? Why do the bad guys want our grizzled group dead? I sincerely cannot recall. Why does Mamet's beautiful and underused wife Rebecca Pidgeon, playing the zealous handler of our team's main CIA adversary, send this top agent of hers into a top-secret archive to get a highly classified report which she knows exposes absolutely nothing? If a notoriously effective CIA assassin is so inordinately good at what he does, why does he sit his kidnap victim in the back of his car with duct tape over her mouth while driving busy roads long distance? Why does Willis infiltrate a character's home to hold a family hostage and then leave without achieving anything? Why am I still sitting here even halfway through, still watching this? If a spoilsport evaluator has the nerve to spotlight that Willis is risking a stranger's life for no worthy reason and that ditzy Parker never raises a sincere protest about it, defenders will respond that an action comedy doesn't have to make sense if it's got enough, you know, action and comedy. But the action is a flaccid miscellany of slo-mo and CGI, and save for Malkovich, who's intermittently useful as a madcap LSD martyr, the comedy comprises cheesy, ineffectual backbiting rather than incisive remarks about age or espionage.
I think middle-aged and older folks are supposed to enjoy this abject nonsense, because it's ceaselessly trying to manipulate us with music and contrived revelation how clever it thinks its retired characters are, and that they've "still got it," but the joke is on this movie because it's just as inexhaustibly stupid and utterly routine as any number of Michael Bay, John Cena or Vin Diesel vehicles those little shavers guzzle down. The only difference is that this one can't decide whether it's a farce or a retread.
In one scene, Mirren is shot and a blood stain spreads on her white dress. In a closing scene not a day later, she's perfectly chipper and has had time to send the dress out to the cleaners. A story is about diligence, attention to detail, not shortcuts and the path of least resistance to all the big bangs. But what is so maddening about this movie is not its storytelling flaws and anti-intellectual cheesiness, but that the overseers at Summit and DC Entertainment know it. And every coveted master performer in its amazing cast knows it too. It's all a big flex of Hollywood's muscle, reminding us that no matter how increasingly hard it is to get a truthful human story made out there, how many personal visions are squandered and artistic visions are rejected, the bigwigs can in a time of recession take $60 million, effortlessly gather the most eye-popping jamboree of great actors we've ever seen and crap all over our faces. And make their money back. So they can do it again. And again.