Eye Candy #455 - "Red"

Red:  Based loosely on the comic book miniseries of the same name (“loosely“ as in “one last name and the color of the title“), “Red” is a baby boomer’s action wet dream.  Bruce Willis is Frank Moses, a retired CIA assassin living out a quiet, empty life of boredom while failing to fit in with “normal society”.  The only enjoyment he has is talking by phone with his pension account clerk who he fancies (Mary-Louise Parker).  However, he finds himself on an assassination list for some old wetwork he did.  Almost immediately he’s on the run (with the clerk in tow) to find out why and to get by with a  little help from his friends, all of whom are old spooks with vary degrees of lethality (played by Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, and an uproarious John Malkovich, who almost steals the movie as a violent paranoid).  Bryan Cox, Rebecca Pidgeon, Karl Urban, Julian McMahon and Richard Dreyfuss are here in support as various shadowy and government types.  Fun, violent (though not terribly gory), with some nice against type performances, particularly from Malkovich and Mirren as ‘action heroes‘.   The cast is obviously having fun.  The script clips right along so that you barely notice its almost 2 hour running time.  And while the violence is deliberately silly, it’s not out of context with the film.  Woodchuck sez, “Me likey.”