Review:
This movie is hilarious. The closest I can come to describing it is Alias or Mission: Impossible meets Ocean’s Eleven, with some Romancing the Stone thrown in. The humor isn’t slapstick or OSS: 117 type winking, it’s more Ocean’s Eleven style ribbing. I really was laughing throughout the entire movie.
RED is comic book style spies, with lots of silly bad-assery – and you can just tell the actors are loving every minute of it. If you’re the type of person who enjoys watching 12 guys in ski masks surround a house in the burbs, unload grenades and machine guns, and somehow all get taken down by one guy single-handedly, then you will love this movie.
I haven’t read the comics so I can’t say for sure, but I’m hearing the movie is much lighter in tone than its source material. I can easily believe that’s true, because this movie is just a big ball of fun.
Helen Mirren with a machine gun is just as awesome as you’d expect, but John Malkovich and Mary Louise Parker steal the show. The comic nuances they bring to their parts are priceless – their expressions constantly cracked me up. There’s one scene where John Malkovich is holding a pink stuffed animal – a pig – by the tail and has this utterly dejected look on this face. I just about died. It’s these type of little moments that make RED so much fun.
Bruce Willis was born to make this movie (though he’s still doing that strange wispy voice we heard in Live Free or Die Hard), and I only wish there had been more screen time for Morgan Freedman and Helen Mirren. Karl Urban (Bones from Star Trek) plays the CIA guy trying to track them all down, and he looks very sexy in his tailored suit while doing so. Even the smaller roles were packed, with Richard Dryfuss, Brian Cox, Julian McMahon and Ernest Borgnine all showing up. The casting was insane.
RED is two hours of sheer hilarity and stylish shoot-outs. Definitely check it out – it’s a blast.
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