Breezy action

Rating: 6/10 (18 January 2014)

This movie is in the best tradition of the breezy action flick. The locales don't rise to the level of the best Bond, the quips and villains are far from the standard set by Die Hard, but nonetheless, it is jolly good fun to watch.
What distinguishes it from many similar films is a competent ensemble cast of A-list actors, and some good ideas on how to use them. For example, Morgan Freeman has a cameo as an 80 year-old terminal cancer patient who dies willingly for his friends as the ultimate deus ex machina. John Malkovich gets some good laughs as the conspiracy theorist armed to the teeth: all of his conspiracies come true.
What it shares with similar films is a predictable and improbable concoction of a plot that pits Helen Mirren and Bruce Willis as retired CIA agents against the Vice President of the US (or really, the corrupt industrialist behind the VP). For starters, the Bad Guy could just have stopped after killing a reporter who dug up too much dirt. If he had not started offing the Good Guys, none of them would ever have noticed anything is amiss - end of movie. Then there are the usual situations where a cut to the next scene gets the characters out of impossible situations, the people with dislocated/shot shoulders who fight on like nothing happened, agents with handguns who don't die in a spray of heavy machine gun fire, etc.
But these nit-pickings are really irrelevant in such a film. The story breezes along with fewer dull moments as it progresses, the acting is solid as expected from a cast of this caliber. There are nice touches like the animated postcard transitions between locations. And just when you worry that the writers are setting up a lame sequel in Moldova, they deconstruct that idea by reducing it to silliness. A well crafted show good for an entertaining single viewing. If you want plot consistency, go watch a film by Ingmar Bergman or Alfred Hitchcock.