RED Movie Review

I may be dating myself by asking this, but remember the good old days of action heroes and big action flicks? How there was never an action movie to write home about saying "Wow! That was some stellar acting by Bruce Willis!" or "Holy crap! That plot twist was incredible!", but they were still movies you watched over and over and over because they were just so damned cheesy, yet so damned good? Remember the Die Hards, the Commandos, the James Bonds, how all these movies were churned out faster than they could make them, yet we still cheered for more? Those sure were great times, and "Red" really takes me back.

I had very little hope for anything special from this film, and I hadn't heard very much about it since it seemed to get a relatively low amount of advertising, considering the A-list cast and budget. So when I sat down and turned it on, I almost spit my popcorn everywhere when I started giggling like a little school girl about 10 minutes in. Yes that's right, a little school girl, because it transported me back to the good old days when I'd go down to the theatre with my dad and watch a Schwarzenegger or Van Damme flick.

The movie is about a retired black ops agent, Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), who is targeted by the CIA, and hunted by a high tech agent (Karl Urban). Moses takes flight and kidnaps the woman he's been romancing, Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), and they make a run from the government. To find out why he's become a target, Frank reassembles his old team of operatives: Joe (Morgan Freeman), his ex-sidekick, Marvin (John Malkovich), a psychotic ex-tech person, Victoria (Helen Mirren), a weapons specialist, and Ivan (Brian Cox), the token badass Russian.

The storyline and the characters are formulaic of a classic action film, but the thing that really made it special - aside from the well delivered, zany dialogue - was the fact that it not only blended a perfect mix of classic action with today's more sleek and serious action films, but it also made light of the fact that it's a throwback film. All of the action characters are past middle-aged, and from the golden age of action movies, and the director constantly pokes fun at this fact. Unlike recent throwback movies like "The Expendables", director Robert Schwentke actually managed to put these idols all together and keep a sense of humility about them. I didn't think "Hey! It's Bruce Willis playing another John Maclean character!" (if you don't know who that is, there's no hope for you). I felt genuinely pulled in and interested in these characters without thinking about the fact that they're all actors with a huge grocery list of achievements.

This may not be the deepest, most thought provoking film you'll see, but it's one of those movies you'll want to watch over and over. Nostalgia or not, it's a good old fashioned shoot em up, with a side of well written banter by veterans to the genre.