Film Review | Red

Comic books have been a fertile ground for Hollywood to exploit over the past decade or so.

Superheroes – arguably the most popular genre within comics, for better or worse –  have always had an appeal across generations, but it was only as the noughties rolled on that the technology was advanced and affordable enough to morph the four-colour adventures of spandex-clad superbeings into something that is not in fact entirely cringeworthy.

And there had been a number of successes amid the inevitable mulch: Spider Man and the X-Men had a good run, and Christopher Nolan’s revamping of Batman was considered a work of first-class populist cinema by some (if not most) critics and audiences – The Dark Knight even drew comparisons to Michael Mann’s heat.

But as with all successful commodities, a point of exhaustion follows all too swiftly. The world is still awaiting the third and final instalment of Nolan’s Batman saga (not-too-imaginatively titled ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, recent news has uncovered) and I can foresee it being a final piece of earnest, gritty superhero cinema before the veil is finally dropped and the genre turns into a hollow joke. Something else will come along, and we’ll gobble it up eagerly, as we always do.

But just because we’re tired of superheroes doesn’t mean that we have to give up on comic book films wholesale. As a longtime comics geek, I always found the instant lumping together of the superhero genre with the entire artform rather frustrating: you can’t just lump the vessel and its most popular exponent together (it probably isn’t even the most prevalent example of what comic books do).

But it seems as if Hollywood has finally caught on to this fact. Matthew Vaughn’s Kick Ass was a final swan song to the superhero genre: both parodying and taking advantage of its tropes. Also in the same year, Edgar Wright’s adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley instant classic Scott Pilgrim vs. The World was an unabashedly indie project which showed a side to comics rarely seen by that amorphous group sometimes referred to as the ‘general public’.

Despite not generating that much cash at the box office (Scott Pilgrim even more so – its underperformance was made all the more poignant by the heartening response previews got), both films drummed up enough buzz and goodwill amongst fans, and will, I suspect, snowball into beloved cult classics in years to come.

While also stemming from not-so-lustrous sources, Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveller’s Wife, Flightplan)’s RED was spared of any box office embarrassment. Adapted from the three-issue comic book series by writer Warren Ellis and illustrator Cully Hamner, it boasts an ensemble cast of gracefully-ageing Hollywood players. And while the original comic book series was released by Homage Entertainment – a mere imprint, recently scrapped, of DC Comics (home to Batman and Superman)  – its cinematic incarnation, expanded and morphed liberally by sibling screenwriting duo Jon and Erich Hoeber, is a perfectly hewn, and just a touch quirky, bit of light entertainment about retired spies being forced out of retirement.

Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) used to be a highly effective CIA operative but now, he languishes in retirement, tearing up his pension cheques as they come in so as to have an excuse to keep calling the pensions office to awkwardly flirt with Sarah Ross (Mary Louise Parker), his assigned Customer Service Agent. Along with Joe (Morgan Freeman), Marvin (John Malkovich), and Victoria (Helen Mirren), Frank’s specialty was carrying out contracts that the government wanted to keep under wraps. As you’ve probably already guessed, someone higher up now sees them as a liability (they are labelled RED – ‘retired, extremely dangerous’) and decides to exterminate them one by one, with agent William Cooper (Karl Urban) taking the lead.

To her initial dismay, Sarah is taken along for the ride too, since the CIA has been tapping her conversations with Frank. Juggling this unconventional courtship while doing his best to stay alive, Frank marshals the old team for a final mission – to find and exterminate whoever’s ordered their assassination.

Parker’s performance is a succinct embodiment of everything the film sets out to do: she is sexy but never posturing, quirky but never hard to swallow or unpleasant. She goes along for the ride partly because she’s forced to but, also, because she’s enamoured with Frank and wants some excitement out of life – spies and flying bullets notwithstanding. And this comical approach to the steely mayhem of the world of espionage is what makes this a fun, relaxing little ride.

To be sure, the script as a whole is well made: there’s a good beat of jokes throughout, and the cast have an effortless charisma – everyone has accepted the fact that they are over the hill as spies but as actors, this gives them a vibe of devil may care humility that’s infectious.

Morgan Freeman, however, remains a sore spot: can he play something other than wise old man already? And here he proves that he can’t even do a pretend-French accent right. I despair. But whatever, he isn’t there for long enough to ruin the fun.

The re-blossoming romance between Mirren’s Victoria and Brian Cox’s KGB agent Ivan Simanov is heartwarming in all the right ways, and largely made possible by note-perfect performances.

And that’s the thing about RED; for all it’s dazzle of stars, the miracle is that something of such scale (and boasting a plethora of blockbuster-friendly explosions) comes together so effortlessly well, and that it’s intentions remain pure: to extract a smidgeon of human poignancy out of an action-comedy romp.