‘Red’ Review: Give It Up, Grandpa

There is something unnerving about the fall of an action star, that slow, agonizing moment when their slick punches and kicks become slow and agonizing. It’s when old bones inaudibly creak, and when stuntmen almost outnumber the cast. When we watch Bruce Willis run across a exploding set with fire in his eyes but a slight gimp in his step, it’s as though a piece of us has aged as well.

Willis was king of the action flick. Unlike his contemporaries, Willis always brought a hidden humanity to roles that required little more than guttural grunts. Where Schwarzeneggers and Stallones quickly mumbled through dialogue to get back to the groin-punching and face-blasting, Willis read his one-liners with a school-boy charm and a wink that turned each juvenile catchphrase into a tiny moment of witty triumph. His muscles, cut with precision, were within the realm of plausibility, not swollen balloons stapled to his arms. Willis was the everyman, not Superman.

Now in RED, an action-comedy from director Robert Schwentke loosely based on a comic book of the same name, Willis has become that augmented hero, fueled by CGI post-processing instead of adrenaline. One sequence has him slip out of a moving car with a slow-motion fluidity that’s painfully fake. Another scene blurs the fight behind gun barrel flares. We don’t see our hero shoot the baddies, only their bodies lifelessly fly through walls. When Willis’ wrinkled head pokes through the dust, it’s impossible to believe he did any of it.

The story focuses on Willis, here playing ex-CIA operative Frank Moses, as he assembles his old comrades to once again do battle with a legion of federal agents and mercenaries sent to kill him.

The group is a rag-tag bunch. John Malkovich is the comic relief as a crotchety, unhinged dingbat driven to madness by years of government LSD experiments. Morgan Freeman joins the party to play (surprise, surprise) the wise old man who questions his own mortality. He’s the movie’s surrogate conscience, like a full-sized Jiminy Cricket.

“I never thought this would happen to me,” Freeman laments from a nursing home lobby.

“What?” Willis asks.

“Getting old.”

Each action set piece drips with added visual effects; this film is supposed to be based on a comic book, but all this CGI work brings us away from the physicality that makes action movies so much fun. I railed on The Town for aspiring and failing to be more than just an action flick, but at least that film’s action had weight. There was realness to the bullets and car chases, not the cartoon craziness that’s so prominent in RED.

Even Kick-Ass another recent comic-book remake, provided its audience with believable, cathartic violence. Each punch taken by our titular hero felt like a gut-shot for the audience. In RED, the action moments are more video game than reality. It’s supposed to be mindless fun, but RED is soulless.

The script, from brothers Jon and Erich Hoeber, is rife with cliché. Like their previous effort, the arctic thriller Whiteout, the Hoebers rely heavily on gimmick, in this case, RED’s aging stars. Needless to say, there’s no shortage of “old man” jokes, and a romance subplot is tossed in for good measure to gunk up the works even more.

The love interest is played by Mary-Louise Parker who desperately tries to make the most of a role that’s dead-on-arrival. Karl Urban, last seen as Doctor McCoy in the Star Trek reboot, rounds out the subpar supporting cast with his growling CIA agent. An early scene has Urban casually chatting to his wife about his precocious children while he arranges another man’s staged suicide. It’s the film writers screaming at us that he cares, but the whole moment comes across as just callous. Sure enough, Urban’s loyal heart comes back into play later in the movie, a conceit so telegraphed that even Julie Andrews could have dodged the punch.

But about halfway through the movie, something amazing happens. Helen Mirren drifts onto the scene, an angel of death in white, and suddenly the film becomes entertaining. Mirren tackles her ex-MI6 agent role with the intensity of a maternal grizzly bear. She flashes us a docile smile while she holds a submachine gun under a bouquet of roses. She twirls gracefully in a blindingly white dress, then snaps off her high heels and jumps into black combat boots. When Parker naively asks Mirren what she does, the white-haired beauty’s accented reply is simple: “I kill people, dear.”

The marvelous Mirren is a revelation, the only living body in a sea of hollow has-beens. It’s a shame that her character is pushed aside by RED’s ripened men. But when given a chance, Mirren chomps on her scenes with ferocity, stealing the climatic gun battle away from the big bad Bruce Willis. Despite the old men desperately flexing in this flick, it’s Mirren who really has the cajones.

Poor writing and recycled action makes RED nothing more than a toss-away flick. Not even Helen Mirren’s endearing performance can save these geriatrics: C-