What do you get when you put Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Mary Louis Parker, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Karl Urban and Richard Dreyfuss in a movie together? Apparently, a hell of a good time. RED brings us into a heightened reality of superstar retired CIA agents and governmental conspiracies. In a lot of ways, it’s the Ocean’s Eleven of spy movies, without copious twists or surprises. The flick oozes style, which doesn’t completely make up for the lack of substance involved. All the actors seem to be having a blast, and it gives the movie a refreshingly light-hearted tone. You’re not expected to think that what’s going on is reasonable, or even within the realm of the comic book source material, but you don’t have to do so in order to enjoy it. It kills a bit of the dramatic tension since you’re never really concerned about your favorite characters biting the dust, but the self-consciousness lends the project a certain charm it may not have otherwise had.

The plot unfolds in a pretty classic pattern, with the attempt on the protagonist’s life sparking a search for who’s trying to kill him and why. The team element, surprisingly, isn’t about getting an old squad together again like the ads would like you to think. Instead, each character is only thinly connected through prior missions and happen to be on the same hit list. This way, the writers can have the familiarity of old friends but the surprise of camaraderie in one movie, stuffing a lot of development into a smaller lightweight package. If someone told me that there was a sequel in the works, I’d have to ask “Why?” This feels like all the story that this universe has to offer, and if that isn’t a good reason to leave it as a standalone movie, I don’t know what is.

Unfortunately, RED never gets past the intellectual shallows, choosing to have fun with the action sequences and the one-liners instead of opening up the world and hinting at darker details. The audience is asked to believe that everyone involved are hardcore agents, but they don’t really earn our respect until the third act. It’s always Bruce Willis kicking ass, not his character, whereas John McLane was the reason that Die Hard was so successful. We never get past the celebrity of the actors, and while George Clooney and Brad Pitt robbing a casino felt genuinely inventive, the performances here serve more as simple plot advancement. There’s enough to enjoy on a superficial level, but if you’re looking for excitement, there’s not very much adrenaline to go around. Even the camerawork is calm and mostly stationary, a wonderful break from the modern action shakycam, but without story intensity to compromise.

The flick really reminds an audience that movie stars aren’t the powerhouses they used to be. Putting together a

cast like this is an impressive feat by contemporary standards, as successful projects nowadays have less to do with the starring actors and more the type of story an audience wants to see. Still, we like watching Willis do his thing with a firearm, and there’s something comforting about an old school studio action movie still being able to find funding. Maybe endless franchises and sequelitis haven’t killed the industry yet. In any case, this is a definite matinee popcorn choice, and not something that should be critically analyzed or picked apart. Mindless fun seems to be in short supply these days, and in this case, there’s enough plot between the holes to keep it from feeling entirely worthless.

Synopsis:

When his idyllic life is threatened by a high-tech assassin, former black-ops agent Frank Moses (Willis) reassembles his old team in a last ditch effort to survive.