As I ponder what to do during my retirement, it often involves the usual sitting on a porch, yelling at kids to get off my lawn – whether they are there or not. In all honesty, I picture myself sitting in a very similar position to the one I am in now, a pile of books next to me. My sweat pants slightly more diaphanous from the years of washing-machine neglect, but in the end, I’ve never imagined being hunted down for knowledge that I possessed. In fact, the likelihood of stumbling upon government secrets and being the sole outsider holding this information seems unlikely given the ease of which we can access Wikileaks.
However, the summer release RED explores this scenario by giving us Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), a former black-ops CIA agent. Standing for Retired and Extremely Dangerous, RED is the spray-paint-style tag on the cover of Moses’ file. As a retiree, life seems rather boring for Moses, and he spends a lot of his time tearing up his pension checks so he has a reason to call payroll and talk to Sarah (Mary Louise Parker), and equally lonely, but far less experienced individual who has hardly ever travelled out of that state and lives vicariously through romance novels and action dramas.
One night, a barrage of soldiers stealthily infiltrates Moses’ house to eliminate him; however, retirement has not atrophied his mental or physical abilities, so he takes care of them, and blows up his own house in the process. Given his wealth of calls to Sarah discerned from phone taps, Moses assumes another band of mercenaries will venture to her location, Kansas. So, he does what any rational man would do in a an action-comedy – he drugs and kidnaps her in the process of getting his old covert brook back together, a rabble that includes Joe Matheson (Morgan Freeman), Victoria (Helen Mirren), and Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich). While Freeman is rather underused in this film and is part of a predictable twist, Mirren is rather funny as a stoic British woman who has a penchant for automatic weapon and Gatling guns. Moreover, Malkovich is the consistently comedic element in this movie as a twitchy, paranoid, conspiracy theory enthusiast who was secretly fed LSD each day for a couple of years.
All in all, RED is what a summer action should be, and given that it’s now January of the following year, it is what a sedate night with a beer and On Demand should be. It’s all around fun without trying to say too much. The cast truly sells this movie, and Mary Louise Parker adds a calmness to a movie filled with action, keeping it a bit past level, but well below exaggerated possibilities – although they occur as well. They have to.
What’s quite interesting about RED, is the subtext. There is a reason why Moses is being hunted, and it’s because he knows too much information, particularly about the Vice President Robert Stanton (Julian McMahaon), who at one time was a lieutenant and Vietnam, and to fill a common requirement of any Vietnam-afflicted character, had a minor breakdown and massacred an entire village. Clichéd? Yes, but this leads to an interesting note on today’s society.
In the past, an event like this could be covered up with some hush money. Government agencies could seek out those involved, offer some bribes, sign some contracts, etc. Truthfully, I’m not sure how the exact process works, but I would assume that the events could be spun in such a way that the fabrication would overtake the truth, and the mound under the shag run would just continue to grow. However, today the internet and ubiquity of social networks, coupled with celebrity / fame obsession makes it much more difficult to silence everyone, particularly since starting and epidemical rumor only takes as long as typing it and clicking “Share” on your Facebook wall. So, the old rumor-mill example of “you tell two friends and they tell two friends and they…” has been replaced by “you tell five hundred friends and they tell five hundred friends…”
So, if the explosions and pithy punch lines become boring, RED also offer a meta-take on the human timeline. Often, we worry about being caught in a precarious situation, but time is said to heal all wounds, but what if these temporal moments that we wish would fade from memory become permanent staples on the asynchronous internet?
DYL MAG Score: 7
