An evil film which should never have been made

Rating: 1/10 (23 February 2011)

This is a deeply immoral film and everyone associated with it should be ashamed. The film goes far beyond the trivialization of murder to encompass also the trivialization of psychopathic murderers themselves. Four internationally famous film stars of a certain age have come together in this film to disgrace themselves and retrospectively damage their lifelong reputations by their appalling antics. John Malkovich, who has done such fine work in the past, here makes a complete ass of himself attempting unsuccessfully to be funny while playing a paranoid psychopathic killer. Ha. Ha. If Malkovich is that much of an insipid fool, then we must reevaluate his entire life's work. And then there is Helen Mirren. Carried away by her own vanity, one presumes, she thinks it cute to smirk and make wry smiles and witty asides while confessing eagerly that she simply can't stop killing people. Titter, titter, isn't she just the cutest thing? Now we turn to Morgan Freeman. How can a person of his supposed stature possibly lend his name and talent to this toxic soup of cutesy cutesy psychopathic killers? Does Freeman think he, like his vain and heedless colleagues, is also being ever so amusing? Does he too wish to start a new career as a stand-up comedian? I have heard glowing reports of him for years from some of my best friends who are close friends of his: he is such a fine man, what a wonderful fellow. Well, I can now discount all of that, as it all goes into the trash can. They can say what they like, but the evidence is before us, and that speaks louder than words. And this brings us to the mumbling, bumbling Bruce Willis. He does this sort of relentless killer thing all the time, so we expect nothing less of him. He, like Nick Nolte and countless others, evidently thinks he is Marlon Brando. That is why he mumbles and whispers all the time, so that only about half of what he says is audible. Idiot actors like Willis believe that mumbling 'draws the audience in' and makes them pay more attention to the empty, vacuous ego who mumbles. Yes, Willis, down boy, down boy! Producers know very well that when the hero mumbles incoherently in an action movie it doesn't matter, because nobody is listening to the words anyway, they are just waiting for the explosions and the gunfire and the screams. Who wants to hear what Bruce Willis is saying when he is busy shooting people and blowing things up? The dialogue in the script means nothing in such circumstances. Screenwriters are pointless vestigial organs to an action movie production: their dialogue is largely ignored, except for the odd sound bite to steer the audience through a cut or a transition of scenes. This film, like so many other Hollywood action movie monstrosities, is like a computer game. Bang bang bang. Boom boom boom. Flash flash flash. The aim is to kill as many people as possible and 'score'. The aim is also to blow up as many things as possible. Retard adolescents who spend their lives killing people on small screens like to have bigger and bigger explosions, and Hollywood action movies carry this over onto bigger screens, and with even bigger explosions. The more people who get killed and the more things that get blown up, and the bigger and more grandiose the explosions, the 'better' the action movie. And if John Malkovich can behave like a jibbering monkey and be the unfunniest funny man in the history of comic books, well that is meant to be really something too, especially if, as in this film, he lives in an underground bunker which resembles the hideaway of a psychopathic teenaged computer nerd. For this film is quintessentially adolescent, and makes no pretence at embodying even the slightest flicker of either intelligence or conscience. I see that the film's director Robert Schwentke is currently making a film based on a comic book. Well, that sounds about right for him. But I wonder if he can read it? Is he that advanced? This film is based on 'a graphic novel' which presumably had no words and just pictures. That too figures. Such is the level of illiteracy in Hollywood today, that the 'books' on which films are based are now either without words or with mere comic balloons. The lunatics have finally fully and totally taken over the asylum, and they are all illiterate baboons. Today I got an email add from amazon.com advertising the DVD of the film RED with the catchline: 'Are you looking for something in our Comedy DVD department?' Well, what does that tell us? It is confirmation that the glorification of psychopathic murderers is now officially classed as comedy, and is desperately, uproariously funny. So funny is it in fact that all the world's genuine victims of psychopathic killers can be presumed to have been not murdered at all, but must really have died laughing. Yes, the next time a madman rapes and kills an unfortunate girl, that is comedy. All the people dying in Libya because of the psychopathic Gaddafi are really laughing themselves to death, with Helen Mirren wryly smiling and with that hungry killer's glint in her eye. Maybe Mirren, Freeman, Willis, and Monkeyvich should all go to Libya and help Gaddafi's African mercenaries murder people in the streets. Maybe they would be at home in that environment, and they could crack jokes with each other about it, making cute little smiles and wry glances at one another and could say every time a body falls in the street: 'I feel so good at being back at actively killing again, as I have missed it so much.' And Monkeyvich could make apish faces as the court jester of the madman Gaddafi, while Mirren, Willis, and Freeman laugh heartily at how wonderfully exciting it all is.