Movie Review: RED 2 (2013)

Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) and his ex-retirement-cheque-customer-service-representative girlfriend Sarah (Mary Louise-Parker) have been living together in not-quite domestic bliss since the events of 2010’s RED, when their old cohort Alvin (John Malkovich) pops up with paranoid tales of suspicious people following both him and Frank and unsuccessfully attempts to entice Frank back into action.

Despites Frank’s protestations to the contrary, Alvin is proven right and soon there are agents both new and familiar after them. It’s time for these Retired Extremely Dangerous spies to once more find out who has set them up and put to rest the threat to their continued retirement through any means necessary. In Alvin’s case, the more violent the better.

While the first RED remained US bound, the sequel is more of a globe-trotting adventure. Taking place in France, the UK and Russia as the team searches for more details on project Nightshade: a top secret project to smuggle an American nuke into Moscow piece by piece that Frank and Alvin have been implicated in.

Real Cosy, Frank

Along the way Frank, Alvin and Sarah cross paths with a mix of both old and new faces. Helen Mirren’s sniper/assassin Victoria, now seemingly much less retired than in the first film and inexplicably presented as having questionable loyalties, David Thewlis as an information broker, Catherine Zeta-Jones’ accent-less Russian agent Katyja who is an ex-paramour of Frank who’d like to rekindle some old flames (much to Sarah’s chagrin), Brian Cox’s jovial Russian agent from the first film, Neal McDonough’s cold blooded killer Jack Horton, Byung-hun Lee (Storm Shadow from the GI Joe films) as Han who is a former nemesis of Frank’s and currently the top hitman in the world, and finally, Anthony Hopkins’ batty Bailey who is a nuclear scientist who has been marked for a lifetime of “incarceration over execution” due to the dangerous knowledge in his noggin.

Unfortunately, the number of stars in the cast does not equal to the quality of the film. Willis delivers his now customary sleep walking performance in the lead role, Mary Louise Parker gets a little more to do this time around as she battles Zeta Jones’ overt advances on Frank, and Hopkins is suitably daft as a nutty professor role, but it barely stretches him. It’s Mirren and Malkovich that primarily make the film watchable, with Mirren juxtaposing Victoria’s deadly skill set with a regal bearing to good comedic effect. She lights up the screen when on it and slyly references her past character choices when she has to pretend to be a mental patient who thinks she’s Queen Elizabeth in order to advance the plot. Malkovich mostly wanders through the film with his mouth either agape or pursed in a way that I couldn’t help but find funny.

You’ll be seeing this face A LOT

Apart from these two, there is little to recommend the film with Dean Parisot‘s (Galaxy Quest, Fun with Dick and Jane) direction failing to add any real flair to either the action or the comedy.

Woman, thy name is bad ass

There are some weak attempts to reference the stand out effects scene from the original RED where Frank casually stepped out of a spinning cop car. They have Willis stepping into a spinning car this time around and Mirren shooting out both sides of another spinning sports car , but neither are as impressive this time around. Byung-hun Lee gets the meatiest action scene of the film, fighting off multiple attackers while handcuffed to a mini-fridge door. Overall, the action disappoints.

Considering how loose an adaptation of the Warren Ellis comic book the first film was, only the basic set up and Frank’s second name remained, and how little this instalment has to do with it, Parisot‘s decision to transition between locations using animated interstitials aping the style of the comic book also comes off across as odd.

After this escapade, I think it might be best if these agents remained retired from now on.