Red
Review
by Anthony Morris
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Red
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Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is
pottering around his house with nothing much to do but pretend he's not
getting his pension check so he can make mildly flirty phonecalls with
his case worker Sarah (Mary Louise Parker) when suddenly a heavily
armed kill squad breaks into his house and he has to murder them
all. As movie beginnings go, that's a pretty good one. The
rest of the film doesn't really disappoint either, being a heartily
enjoyable "we're getting the band back together" action comedy whereby
a bunch of everyone's favourite older actors (Morgan Freeman, John
Malkovich, Helen Mirren) get to run around with massive guns having an
excellent time kicking the arses of everyone they come across. The
reason why they're doing this is an overly complicated mystery
involving their shared pasts as professional assassins for the CIA (and
in Mirren's case, MI6), but fortunately you don't really need to pay
much attention to that because it's just there so things can be shot
at, blow up and just generally explode. Karl Urban as
William Cooper, AKA the CIA agent trying to stop all this mayhem with
some mayhem of his own, more than holds his own against the big names,
while Richard Dreyfuss has a fun cameo as a slimeball. The
real surprise here is that, in a film that's largely about the thrill
of seeing old warhorses blowing up everyone who's ever pissed them off
- it's like a comedy version of Unforgiven, only with a lot more gunfire - Mary Louise Parker turns out to be the real stand-out. Given
a fairly thankless role - she's the audience stand-in as we enter this
insane world of retired spies, and as such she all but vanishes for the
final half - she's nothing but fun as someone who turns out to kinda
like this wild and crazy ride. If they ever do a sequel, she's the one to bring back. 4 out
of 5
Red
Australian release: 28th October,
2010
Official
Site: Red
Cast: Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Karl Urban
Director: Robert Schwentke
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