REVIEW: Red

VETERAN'S DAY OUT

"I never thought this would happen to me -- get old" says Morgan Freeman's Joe wryly in Red, an often funny, sometimes dragging action thriller featuring an unusual cast. He's pushing 80 and waiting to die in a Louisiana retirement home. His former pal Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is tearing up pension cheques to prolong his telephonic interaction with the sweet girl Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker, nutty and on the loose) and watching an avacado bulb grow in a bottle, before the CIA comes calling and tears down his house.

Frank being a former black-ops super-agent with a reputation bad enough to have the department dub him 'retired and extremely dangerous' (hence the film's title RED), has no problem polishing off the assassins. Next he picks Sarah up on the way to a hilarious and highly implausible adventure across America trying to unravel the agency's sinister plot to eliminate him. On the way, he enlists former associates, Joe, Marvin (John Malkovich, the only actor on earth who can play the part of a man subjected to daily doses of  LSD for 11 years with plausibility!) and Victoria (delectable Helen Mirren) who's busy baking and gardening in her quiet country home -- although she does admit to taking the odd 'contract' on the side. 

There's a cute sub-plot involving Victoria and Ivan (Brian Cox) a relic from the cold war who, being a Russian, is the only guy around with ready access to the CIA's secret codes. Like everyone else, he's missing the action and happily joins the party.

Nobody's taking this film seriously -- neither the writers, Erich and Jon Hoeber who've adapted the plot from a graphic novel, nor director Robert Schwentke who treats its explosive violence in the spirit of the comic-book source. The actors, on their part, have a blast. Literary. Malkovich, in particular, is spectacularly loony as the paranoid junkie who views the entire world with suspicion. Mirren and Parker have their moments, while Bruce Willis gleefully hams up the role of a burnt out commando/star who's only too glad to reprise the parts that defined his career. 

Red isn't a memorable film, but for the fact that here are stars we've grown up watching and now, seeing them graciously accept their age, laugh at themselves and have one more go at it, evokes a feeling of nostalgic joy.