Red (Bruce Willis, Mary-Louise Parker, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman) – Roger Ebert got this one wrong. Red is a wonderful, entertaining and total spoof of the spy genre. It’s Night of the Museum with box-office favorites Bruce Willis, John Malkovich. Helen Mirren, and Morgan Freeman substituting for Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, and Bill Cobbs. Coming on the heels of Sly Stallone’s The Expendables (which Willis made an appearance in), Red doesn’t take itself seriously and provides laugh-out-loud moments.
In case this needed a plot, Willis plays Frank Moses, a retired super-agent, lonely and in need of action, who is chatting up Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker of Weeds and The Client), the customer service agent at the pension bureau, in hopes of having the first real relationship in his post-spy life. When he finds himself the target of the bad guys, he takes matters into his own hands and engages on a cross-country journey (with a reluctant Sarah at his side) to reunite his former colleagues to try to figure out why they’re being targeted years after their primes. That takes us to Joe (Morgan Freeman), now 80 and dying of liver cancer; paranoid Marvin (John Malkovich, who is crazy funny in a way only he can pull off); and still-gorgeous Victoria (Helen Mirren who looks like she is having wonderful fun as she did in Calendar Girls and National Treasure: Book of Secrets). They pull out the machine guns, automatic rifles, handguns, and pyrotechnics to stage a raid on CIA headquarters and evade the Agency’s super-agent du jour (played by Karl Urban, who played the young Bones McCoy of Star Trek) who is out to get them.
It’s all meaningless fun from there even as the bullets fly as only they can do in spy flicks like the Bond and Bourne movies. Just the chance to watch Malkovich is worth the price of admission. While Sarah’s character is meaningless to the film, she provides a love interest and some motivation for Frank. Willis gets to mimic his own John McClane Die Hard role while getting the girl and having fun with other aging but bona fide movie stars. It’s been awhile since I laughed this much during an “action film” (In Bruges comes to mind) so I recommend it highly.