Red (2010)

Last Orange Wednesday we went to the cinema for the first time since Scott Pilgrim, back in early September, which seems like so long ago. The subject of the trip was Red, an action comedy from the director of The Time Traveller's Wife, a movie I didn't expect to like and ended up really getting into.  And no, following my last post about Blue, this isn't one of the films in the Three Colours Trilogy!

Red stars (deep breath): Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Brian Cox, Ernest Borgnine, Karl Urban, Richard Dreyfuss and Julian McMahon... It's quite a cast, and although it has an Ocean's Eleven/Thirteen feel that they had a lot of fun making the movie, it's slick but not as fun as it might think. That's not to say I didn't enjoy Red, I certainly did, and I'd watch it again, it's just there was something a little subdued about it, not enough action and not frequent enough comedy. 

Having said that, the joy of Red is seeing these older actors cutting loose in the sort of movie usually reserved for characters in their twenties and thirties. Bruce Willis still kicks ass, and my favourite bit of the movie, when he steps out of a moving, spinning car, narrowly missing the boot smacking him in the ass to unload a gun into a pursuing vehicle... it was like vintage Die Hard! It had the audacity of the stunt in Die Hard 4.0 when he kills a helicopter with a car, along with the typical Willis smirk. In fact, Willis seemed permanently set to smirk, and he was a bit reigned in -  I'm watching Moonlighting at the moment, so I wanted more of that Bruce Willis.

The film undeniably looks great, and Helen Mirren is a delight, once she turns up, firing machine guns in a beautiful cocktail dress. The plot is fine, no awards for originality but it kept my interest. The reason I'd happily watch Red again is that it's a lot of fun, a good solid movie with no frills.