Red

Arthritis can play havoc with your trigger finger.

Morgan Free­man is eighty? When he declares his age in Red, I admit to being taken aback.  Turns out he’s early sev­en­ties in real­ity. But still, I some­times for­get how much these stars are get­ting on in years. Mir­ren is push­ing past her mid six­ties, and Ernest Borg­nine, well… wait! What? Ernest Borg­nine is alliiiive??

Turns out he is. He’s in his nineties. He still looks pretty much the same though. I think he’s one of those actors who popped out of the womb look­ing like an old man, Ben­jamin But­ton style. Bruce Willis, and John Malkovich, are the youngest of this old­ish batch of for­mer spies. I guess retire­ment can come at any time in the spy game. It depends how much you know.

And it seems Bruce knows too much. Strug­gling with his years out of the CIA, he passes his time liv­ing on his own in a dreary sub­ur­ban hell, and flirt­ing long dis­tance over the phone with Mary-Louise Parker, under the pre­tense that his pen­sion cheques aren’t turn­ing up. Secretly, he’s rip­ping them in two, so it gives him a rea­son to ring her.

I have a sim­i­lar thing to wake me up in the mornings.

But all this gets inter­rupted by the incon­ve­nience of an elite strike squad drop­ping into his house, whilst he goes down­stairs in the mid­dle of the night for a glass of milk. Except, they’re not that elite. Because this is, y’know, Bruce Willis. Haven’t these guys seen Die Hard?

The plot from here, is not much more than a hook to hang the jokes and the action on. It flits from scene to scene, and city to city, with scant regard for pac­ing. It moves quick, and yet feels a bit slug­gish. I think the prob­lem is that Bruce, as he hits the road with Mary-Louise Parker, never seems to be in much dan­ger. Despite all the danger.

How­ever, once most of the team is together, it set­tles into a reli­able groove, with an action heavy last half. The real high­lights are Mir­ren, and Malkovich. Malkovich being, well, Malkovich. Nutty as hell, his tac­tics for deal­ing with a grenade or a mis­sile are, shall we say, unorthodox.

Mir­ren, as a for­mer MI6 agent, looks right at home squint­ing through the scope of a sniper rifle. With not much to work with, she gives the impres­sion of some­one who’s seen every­thing the spy game has to offer, prob­a­bly break­ing James Bond’s heart along the way.

Towards the end, I felt as though there were maybe two dif­fer­ent sto­ries here, sort of mashed up together. One was an “odd cou­ple” road movie with Bruce Willis and Mary-Louise Parker (their chem­istry is never really fully exploited), and the other was an “even odder cou­ple” road movie (and pos­si­ble TV spin off) with Mir­ren and Malkovich, where they get to fight drug barons, and ter­ror­ism, and evil landlords.

So if some­one could sep­a­rate Red into two dif­fer­ent sto­ries, we might have two great films. Instead, let’s make do with just a good one.