RED

Sometimes an action movie can be completely ridiculous and I can still have a lot of fun. This is one of them. It alternates between over-the-top but fun action scenes and comic releases of tension. Most of the humor comes from Mary Louise Parker, who is very good as a government worker Bruce Willis has been talking to simply because he is terminally lonely, and ends up fleeing for her life with him and his motley crew of ex-CIA killers. The conversations are funny. He has been tearing up his social security checks just to he can talk to her. Then the shit hits the fan. RED stands for Retired, Extremely Dangerous, so we get Bruce and Morgan Freeman (who is dying of cancer in an old folks home) and John Malkovich and Helen Mirren against the whole CIA, proving they still have what it takes. The stand-out, of course, is Mirren, simply because this is not the sort of role you associate her with. She’s a cool British lady who looks good in an evening gown firing a Browning M2HB .50cal machine gun. (How do I know that? I don’t know crap about guns, but there are people who love them, and they’ve put up this useful website: imfdb.com. And BTW, as I suspected, this weapon would fire right through the vehicles she’s shooting at, through the people hiding behind them, and possible through the concrete behind them. But it’s a striking scene, and who the hell needs accuracy in a piece of fluff like this?)