Better off red

Bruce Willis is at his absolute driest in director Robert Schwentke's excellent black comedy/action flick about retired CIA assassins scrambling to strike a balance between their old lives as killers and their current status as veterans who have been officially put out to pasture.

Mary-Louise Parker and John Malkovich also excel in roles that are tailor-made for them but are nonetheless challenging enough to keep them on their toes. Oh yeah, and the diabolically gifted Dame Helen Mirren is on hand, as well. For the record, this review is officially a rave.   

Willis plays Frank Moses, a listless former black-ops agent who is whiling away his time in suburban somnolence, getting his kicks reading romance novels and flirting with the customer service agent (Parker as Sarah) responsible for issuing his pension checks. He acquires a light-up snowman to keep up with the dull normals across the street and maintains his little house obsessively, keeping everything clean and in good, working order at all times.

Moses' domestic torpor is annihilated when a "wet team" of assassins shows up in the middle of the night to rub him out. Our protagonist demonstrates his dearly acquired skill set by dispatching with all of his would-be attackers and taking to the open road. He stops along the way to kidnap Sarah (who is also in danger, if for no other reason than simple association). Romance and adventure ensue.  

Moses teams up with fellow retirees Morgan Freeman as intelligence expert Joe Matheson, Mirren as the crack sniper Victoria and Malkovich as Marvin Boggs. The entire principle cast is above-par, but Malkovich logs a career comedic best (which is saying something) in the slightly farcical role of the militant paranoiac. Mirren is so stately in her turn as a violence-addicted killer that the juxtaposition of manners and malice becomes a running gag.

Parker is the blithe materfamilias from Weeds sans children and narcotics distribution. She may be the single-most likeable middle-aged female still passing as a regular love interest in mainstream movies. Sarah Jessica may be reprising her former fame as an uptown cougar in the tedious Sex and the City franchise, but Mary-Louise remains charismatic and convincing as a female lead without any branding or qualification to buoy her up.    

As for Willis, the aging action hero has phoned in some pretty poor performances over the past decade, but remember, he broke into stardom on the strength of his comedic gifts opposite Cybil Shepard in the popular sitcom Moonlighting. Shepard was the star, but Willis stole virtually every scene (and eventually landed a number of lucrative movie deals) with his spot-on timing and capacity for mischievous understatement. Suffice it to say, he's still got it.

And now that I've sung Red's praises, a quick itemization of its shortcomings should prevent me from coming off as a tipsy cheerleader sick with a crush. It is possible, as a number of readers have pointed out in recent months, to have a sense of humor that is too dry, and Red may be guilty of this flaw. While the carefully attentive may revel in screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber's wry and elliptical dialogue, a lot of the humor may fly over the head of the average moviegoer. One cannot bank on a widespread sensitivity to irony, after all.

Schwentke's adaptation of Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner's comic book series is also decidedly thin and inconsequential. This is not a movie destined to be a classic. But neither is it destined to join the ranks of the backward, tepid, mealy minded stuff that passes for comedy in today's marketplace.

The project is a strange choice for the director of 2009's elegiac, magic realism infused love story, The Time Traveler's Wife, but perhaps Schewntke's intellectual sensitivity has transformed what might have been just another commercial vehicle into something more memorable and certainly more entertaining.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com