RED

Director Robert Schwentke was the man who brought us the sketchy, overly coy adaptation of The Time Traveller’s Wife. As such, the gun-toting Red is something of a change of pace for him. Based, apparently on a graphic novel of the same name by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner – although it could have just as easily been based on an early draft of Stallone’s script for The Expendables – Red sees a group of elderly James Bond types band together to prevent their own extermination. It’s all an excuse to see the likes of Helen Mirren, Brian Cox, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich brandishing automatic weapons, quipping nifty one-liners and smashing heads. And why not? We love to see actors trying something a little out of their comfort zone and we as a nation sure as heck love watching action films, so the likes of Red and The Expendables end up being almost inevitable. Unfortunately, Red isn’t half as much fun as its premise.

By all rights Bruce Willis is now the king of aging tough guys, so naturally he’s the star of this film. He still looks and acts the part with ease and emits sass with every breath. Willis plays Frank Moses (a much better name than Sly’s Barney Ross in The Expendables) a retired former C.I.A. black ops agent, who spends his days flirting with Sarah (Mary Louise Parker - the star of Weeds) a phone operator for a pension’s office in Kansas City. When Willis discovers that there are people who want him dead, any way anyhow, he heads to Kansas City and fearing for Sarah’s life, kidnaps her in order to keep her safe. Frank soon discovers that the C.I.A are hunting down everybody connected with a secret mission that occurred in Guatemala during 1981. Thus ensues is a whistle-stop tour across the United States as Frank gets in touch with his old contacts and tries to get to the bottom of the attempt on their lives.

The plot’s almost as superfluous as the plot for The Expendables and it’s even more episodic. If you know the cast list for the film, you’ll sit there checking off the appearance of each and every big name. Once they’ve established Bruce Willis as Frank Moses, you prepare yourself for the next star, and so on and so forth. It’s circular, lifeless and uninspired stuff. Why when everything is being forced so neatly into the proceedings and each character is given their own fair amount of screen time does the whole thing feel so uncomfortable? The screenplay seems to lack a sense of inspiration or improvisation that could set it apart from the slew of action movies that work their way into cinemas every year.

It just goes to show, it’s not enough to have an all-star cast and expect them to do all the work. This film may have a good box office, but will it remain in our memories for long? All the big players acquit themselves well, but they do so within such formulaic and predictable confines as to make the whole thing null and void. What’s the sense in getting all these stars together for a movie with a silly premise if you’re not even going to have any fun with it? As it is, it’s just one contrivance piled on another, which amounts to little and grows stale very quick. When you’re reaching the half-way mark of the film and you start thinking, “well, that’s everybody on the cast list except Helen Mirren, so I guess we’ll see her next”, you know something’s gone wrong.

It’s not helped by interspersing the action with clunky CGI. At one stage a car chase occurs between Frank Moses and the C.I.A agent sent out to terminate him (Karl Urban). Moses pulls on the handbrake, steps out of his car as it completes a 360 and ambles away to avoid the backside of the vehicle before it impacts with his torso. This could have been a neat little stunt, but the movement of the car is so obviously done with CGI and you can tell the whole thing was done with absolutely no risk to Bruce’s person. That kind of sucks the whole enjoyment out of the affair and renders any chance of excitement negligible. Later in the film, Morgan Freeman ties up the man he believes to be behind the assassination attempts on their lives and slaps him across the face. Am I being paranoid or was this slap actually computer generated? The slap lacked any sense of ‘meat’ – just like the film itself. The whole thing is one big missed opportunity and yet it’s difficult to get worked up about a film like Red. The truth is, I’m not angry about its failings, I’m just disappointed.