Film Review: Red

I always wanted a nice and perfectly agreeable film as this every week, and we very rarely get it. It's just nice to see people who know how to make good entertainment, and I can't help but think how stupid you have to be to not pull that off. Red comes from a DC Comics series of the same name, so it already has a solid backbone to work off of. However, that's hardly the selling point for this film. So rarely do you get an all star cast for such a small film as this. Then again, most of the films that Bruce Willis deals with these days are short budget mediocre action films. On top of that, Morgan Freeman does a fair deal of unobserved straight-to-DVD work these days. And John Malkovich... well, he's John Malkovich.

The film follows retired CIA agent Frank Moses (Willis), who is being inexplicably and aggresively hunted down by the FBI, along with Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), a customer service agent that Frank is attracted to, but has never met before. It's actually a rather sweet and unorthodox love story, which is hardly the point of a film such as this. He gets in touch with his old team members, his mentor Joe Matheson (Freeman), wetwork agent Victoria (Helen Mirren), and an LSD infused whatever Marvin Boggs (Malkovich), and together they decide to track down the man responsible for calling the hits on them.

The cast for the film is spectacular all around. When Bruce Willis walks out of a moving cop car, you know you've made the right choice. Mary-Louise Parker is such an awkwardly funny personality, and I enjoy how her character takes everything in stride with a grain of salt. Malkovich is crazy, and that's probably the only character he was ever born to play. Morgan Freeman adds class to any film, and Helen Mirren fulfills our lifelong dreams with the way she possesses the weaponry she is afforded. Karl Urban adds a hardcore quality to his CIA agent character, who you just know will end up turning into a hero by the end. Ernest Borgnine has a cute and hilarious cameo, and Brian Cox shows up unexpectedly.

The cinematography always feels extremely close to taking that extra leap into an amazing shot, but falls just short of that. It's not bad, but it could've easily been more. The original score by Christophe Beck is exactly what you'd expect it to be. Nothing more. Nothing less. The action in this film is pretty sweet, offering us extreme gun fights (with Helen Mirren) and explosions. What good is an action film without explosions? I'm pointing at you Twilight. The film starts out a bit slow, and takes a while to find it's stride, but when Red does reach that important moment when things take off at full speed, it's a hilarious action-comedy that's actually worthy of the price of a ticket.

B+