By Jason Apuzzo. THE PITCH: Ex-CIA operative Bruce Willis reunites with fellow Agency veterans Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich (?) and Helen Mirren (?!) to take on a ruthless band of CIA bureaucrats, defense contractors and a murderous U.S. Vice President – all while trading gunfire and inane, TV-level banter.
THE SKINNY: What does one say about a film that climaxes with the ‘heroic’ shooting of: a female CIA official, a U.S. Vice President, and a defense contractor (played with smug brio by Richard Dreyfuss)? Red is an ugly, puerile, unfunny, ham-fisted pastiche of every straight-to-video/garbage action film ever made during the 80s-90s – except this particular film is lacquered with a sickening anti-Americanism that most of those films lacked. Only attend this film if the idea of watching Bruce Willis mug at the camera for two hours sounds appealing to you, and your politics are somewhere to the left of Édgar Ramírez’s.
WHAT WORKS:
• The cameo by Ernest Borgnine.
• Absolutely nothing else.
WHAT DOESN’T WORK:
• Watching Bruce Willis mug at the camera for two hours, acting as if we’re back in the late 80s and there’s still something manly and charming about him.
• Depicting the CIA as more murderous and amoral than the KGB, Al Qaeda and the Waffen SS combined.
• Watching Richard Dreyfuss – looking bloated and with a fake tan – preen and strut in a snarky caricature of an American defense contractor, when really he looks like a guy who should just be pushing a broom at a Miami deli.
• Watching an American Vice President – with ambitions for even higher office – depicted as a murderer of women and children, a self-absorbed swine who uses the CIA as a personal assassin squad. Not even Biden deserves that.
BOTTOM LINE:
My understanding is that a new technology has been developed whereby celluloid film prints can be recycled into polyester clothing. My strong suggestion would be to use the 3,500 or so existing prints of Red to clothe the children of Guatemala – assuming they don’t mind wearing polyester. If not, it seems to me that the film could perhaps be re-printed onto soft tissue rolls, and used for other purposes.
One final point: with ‘Hollywood conservatives’ like Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone so eager to knock their own country in this way, who needs Hollywood liberals?
Posted on October 15th, 2010 at 4:09pm.
This is getting to be more than depressing. How can the studios keep making this garbage? And why did Helen Mirren ever agree to be in it?? She is such a marvelous actress. I saw her recently in Racine’s “Phaedra”, a National Theatre production, (the film version of the live play, not live in the theatre.) She was wonderful. I suppose actresses accept work wherever they can get it, and suppose she was paid an inordinate amount to do this wretched film, but I do hate to think that she would stoop to doing something like this just for money when she could have been acting in a great classical play.
It’s indeed depressing, BB …
What does one say about a film that climaxes with the ‘heroic’ shooting of: a female CIA official, a U.S. Vice President, and a defense contractor ?
That the film is morally bankrupt? That, like The Expendables it will make far more money with the offshore Anti-American audience than it will domestically? That Hollywood has finally found a formula for making anti-American movies by using nosthalgia for 80s action heros using actors so desperate for a comeback that they betray the audience they once represented? And finally, like at the end of every war, it’s open season on defense contractors and the secret service.
Right on the money as always, K …
K is right on the money.
I let friends know about THE EXPENDABLES , it’s stock CIA villian, the waterboarding scene but they went anyway, returning to mumble something like “Man!…it was so freakin’ cool to see all the 80s action stars together…the antiCIA stuff wasn’t…. like… in your face….and ‘er the waterboarding scene?… well, uh, yeah but the action was great though.
GEEZ LOWEEEZ!
It’s also lazy scriptwriting, as cliched as the hooker with a heart of gold was from the old days but as standard today as the wise gay male or minority friend in chick flicks, the stuffy, sexually repressed, hypocritical fundalmentalist Christian and the petite action babe wielding her broad sword like a ginsu knife, slicing through dozens of stuntmen twice her size. BUT it’s allowed because it’s accepted by Hollywood.
Films like TAKEN prove that pro CIA, pro American characters can be not only sympathetic but that it makes no difference to the overseas box office reciepts which is a BS excuse Hollywood uses because they don’t have the courage to stand by their leftwing convictions.
I totally agree – it’s a B.S. excuse (‘the world doesn’t like the CIA’) that’s designed to hide a domestic, ideological agenda.
I’m so glad to hear my own impressions about this film confirmed. I saw the trailer, and immediately thought it wouldn’t be the kind of movie I would want to see. It’s particularly a shame to see Bruce Willis descend to this. I’ve always thought he was more of an actor than people gave him credit for…certainly NOT having the capacity to completely disappear into his characters, but nevertheless possessed of a certain subtlety — especially in reaction shots — which most of his movies simply didn’t give him the opportunity to use. What a shame to see him continue (following his short cameo in “The Expendables”) to spit on the audience that gave him his career.
Suffice it to say, it’s very disappointing that he’s going down this road.