RED 2 is not a bad movie. Next flu season, it’s going to bring a lot of joy to people home sick from work watching HBO2. It’s an unremarkable film that comfortably wades around the original’s broad conceit, making the occasional improvement and the erstwhile diminishment before eventually overstaying its welcome and cutting to credits.
The original cast
returns – Bruce Willis as Frank Moses, a grumpy mannequin of Bruce Willis; John
Malkovich as paranoid, social maladroit Marvin; and Helen Mirren as Victoria,
the Ms. Manners of international assassins – for this globe-trotting hunt for a
Cold War-era nuclear weapon.
Directed by Dean
Parisot (GALAXY QUEST) and full of triple-crosses, costume swaps and back-stabbing
turnabouts, RED 2 plays like a dime-store spy novel as written by a senile
Frank Ocean. As it lopes along, the film sprinkles both fresh and veteran performers
into the mix, including the delightful David Thewlis, a less-than-spry Anthony
Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones (doing what one can only hope is her worst Natasha
Fatale) and Lee Byung-hun, the latter of whom is a welcome addition if only for
spicing up the monotonous gunplay with occasional martial arts.
Like RED, RED 2 is
smart enough to back-burner it’s ludicrous plot in favor of playful performances
from its inimitable stars. Its best decision is to alter its thespian pairings
with some regularity, giving their one-and-a-half note characters extended life
by mixing up the screen teams. This technique is best exemplified through a
number of scenes that partner effervescent Mary Louise Parker with eccentric
Malkovich, and a decent car chase that finds Byung-hun burning rubber while
Mirren rides shothandgun.
Let me take a moment
to talk Mary Louise Parker. While I found her bubbly, open-minded character Sarah
Ross to be a fun counterpoint to Moses’ sourpuss weariness in RED (although…
did anyone else feel like she was kinda just playing Lauren Graham?), here I
found her increasingly annoying. Parker’s performance is spot-on… but her
character is written less as a restless adult woman looking to assert her
fading youthful vigor through some much-needed excitement, and more as a
sugar-dusted sweet sixteen begging for a pony ride. That they intermittently
dress her in an itsy plaid skirt only further squikifies her relationship with
the leathery Willis, drifting it to within collision distance of what my
significant other rightly coined, “creepy daddy/daughter fetish BS.”
I’d also like to point
out that the product placement in the film, blatant and prodigious as I’ve ever
seen, actually ends up creating a fun, unintended[?] sub-text – as world
governments tangle for control of the Western world, their proxies executing trigger-happy
power plays and turncoat gambits, the true international powers – the Cokes and
Pringles and Papa Johns – invade peacefully, creating a homogenized backdrop
before which our country-hopping golden agers obliviously battle.
Replacing RED’s adorable,
kitschy postcard transitions with not-faux-enough badass comic book wipes is just
one of the ways in which this installment’s tongue becomes periodically
dislodged from its cheek. The first film
was able to mine a sense of rebellious wit from the juxtaposition of aging,
virtuoso actors and the bombastic violence they sardonically commit. Without that
trick up its sleeve, and with nothing to replace it, this unnecessary sequel
merely fulfills our most modest expectations.
RED 2 is a simple
summer cocktail of black-label actors and draught action – the kind of
unremarkably fun trifle that seems poised to underwhelm the theatergoers of
today and pleasantly surprise the Red Box renters of tomorrow. (2 out of 4
Stars)
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