Starring: Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Mary-Louise Parker Director: Robert Schwentke Category: IIB
In the space of three months, Bruce Willis has shown viewers two ways an action hero confronts middle-age on screen.
One is to pretend the past 20 years - Bauer, Bourne and the reinvented Bond included - never happened by appearing in an unashamedly gung ho and unreconstructed splatterfest. And then there's the postmodern way: play with the has-been image by, well, playing a has-been who joins up with a few other even more idiosyncratic has-beens to kill some bad guys and kiss the girl at the end.
And so it is that Willis followed his cameo appearance in Sylvester Stallone's no-punches-barred summer blockbuster The Expendables with Red, director Robert Schwentke's screen adaptation of a comic book that filters an action-thriller through wit, irony and self-deprecation.
Red stands for what the movie says is the CIA's acronym for its decommissioned but still volatile agents - 'Retired, Extremely Dangerous'. As a film, it stands for a guilty pleasure for anybody who prefers their action film forays laced with knowing comedy, references to murky episodes of US history (where My Lai meets The Manchurian Candidate), and the sight of Helen Mirren wielding machine guns. Mirren's Victoria is one of the former colleagues Willis' character, Frank Moses, approaches when he learns his mundane post-retirement life is being cut short by someone in power trying to whitewash a deadly but confidential operation back in Guatemala in the early 1980s. Frank also calls on his former teammate Joe (Morgan Freeman), now a terminally ill resident in a home for the elderly, and Marvin (John Malkovich. below centre with Willis and Mirren), a paranoid ex-agent with a complete distrust of governments and humanity in general.
Two romances underline the film, the major one being that between Frank and Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), a pension hotline operator who gets more than she asks for in her desire for adventure in her square life. Her travails alongside Frank are mirrored by Victoria's rediscovery of a former flame-cum-nemesis, a bond that goes hand-in-hand with the man's table-turning efforts to help Frank and his gang survive. But it all comes at a price, which is revealed in the film's brief coda.