Movie Review: Red

Gray-Haired Black Ops
Red shows the AARP can kiss kiss, bang bang

Wry sense-of-humor, sly sexuality, potent and visually stimulating violence? Oh, Ernest Borgnine, is there anything you can’t do?

Okay, fine, although the 93-year-old gap-toothed thespian pops up infrequently in Red, a film for which all those previous descriptors do actually apply, his inclusion is a metaphor for the inexplicably kinda-awesome ha-ha/bang-bang extravaganza as a whole. Populated with a cast familiar with a time when ensemble was king, oozing charisma from their aged pores, Red is the anti-Social Network: The script is meh, the concept is as haggard as the lead actor. This proves once more that although words are king, actors can be gods.

Let’s start at the top. Bruce Willis, fresh off not appearing to have aged in more than a decade, is Frank Moses, a retired C.I.A. black ops agent currently bored out of his gourd and obsessing over Sarah (Mary Louise Parker), the lady who answers his phone calls regarding his pension. Just as Frank is about to launch “Operation Get Me Some,” he is ambushed by a squad of assassins. Frank nabs Sarah both for her own protection and because he never abandons an operation and begins searching for answers.

Frank’s first stop is to a nursing home to talk with 84-year-old former-spy-turned-stage-4-liver-cancer-patient Joe (Morgan Freeman), who can still kill you with a Bic pen. Joe gives Frank a list of names that leads him to Marvin (John Malkovich), a retired operative whose drug-addled brain should be a wake-up call to current real-life starlets. Constantly pursued by good-guy-conned-into-doing-bad-things, Agent William Cooper (Karl Urban), Frank also enlists the aid of a wily Russian (Brian Cox) and a slinky silver-haired sniper (Helen Mirren) before embarking on a rather ambitious final gambit filed under “only in implausible movies.”

That implausibility is actually the best thing that screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber culled from the source material, a graphic novel (the politically correct term these days for a comic book) by Warren Ellis. Although we are all willing to believe Willis will be a physical marvel capable of death dealing throughout his Depends era, Red is one of those stupidly awesome flicks that also sees no need to capitulate to the laws of physics or reasonable decision making. It’s a “domino movie,” where each tiny plot point limply falls into the next one: it’s only fun when viewed as a whole.

Thankfully, Robert Schwentke was thinking big picture with his treatment of his uber-cast, with loosey-goosey directing that acknowledged the biggest weapon in the film was the collective nuclear bomb of charm. Try not to have fun while Willis and Malkovich are hamming it up, or when Mirren and Cox are gettin’ their dirty flirty on. Even Urban, by far the spring chicken in this out-to-pasture collective, delivers the goods, notably in a wicked fight scene with his elder, Willis.

With a dose of noninventive but still giddy-goofy-fun visual shoot-em-up and a heaping helping of old-school actor elbow grease, Red is a surprising nugget of entertainment. It will be quickly forgotten, but as the cast knows, memory isn’t everything…they just can’t remember what is.

Grade = B

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Movie Review: The Last Station

This week I took a ride to Russia by way of England. Not literally of course, travel frightens and confuses me. I got a chance to see The Last Station, which opens at Film Streams this weekend. I know you can't rush out and see it right away after reading this, but hopefully this will wet your whistle for a bit of British biography (of a Russian dude).

War and Preach
Tolstoy’s tale is told by way of the Themes

Writer/director Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station, based on the novel by Jay Parini, is likely as engaging a movie as can be made about a battle over Russian copyright ownership. Every bit as visually exhilarating as it sounds, the entirely non-Russkie cast deploys British accents and relentless grimacing to bombastic melodramatic effect. The air of importance is more preached than earned, but if you freely opt to watch a dramatization of Leo Tolstoy’s last year, you’re likely inclined to buy what’s being sold.

As if resigned to please the eyes as little as possible, the film opens with terse text presented in the least offensive type font imaginable. We’re told that Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) is a pretty big deal, having inspired a worldwide Tolstoyan movement centered on passive resistance and other harmonious ideals. His wife, Sofya (Helen Mirren), loves him as much as she loathes Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), a leader of the movement and insensitive douche.

Chertkov entrusts the committed Tolstoyan Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy) to live at the family estate and to keep tabs on the manic Sofya in order to ensure that she doesn’t interfere with Chertkov’s plans to wrest control of the copyrights to Tolstoy’s writings. Sofya rather reasonably wants the rights to provide for the 13 children she bore ole Leo and attempts to persuade Valentin to sympathize. When he isn’t busy being conflicted about who’s right about the rights, Valetin is busy gettin’ his swerve on with Masha (Kerry Condon), a fellow devotee. The juxtaposition of the young couple discovering love and the elderly duo struggling to hang on to it plays out against a climactic signing of a piece of paper.

Obviously, what’s on display here isn’t derived from plot or eye candy, but top-notch acting from all involved. Although Mirren and Plummer sport the same screen time, Plummer earned a Best Supporting Oscar nod whereas Mirren earned a Best Actress nom, likely because she’s Helen freakin’ Mirren. Plummer is at his scraggly-bearded best, while Mirren mostly chews scenery because she’s earned that right. In reality, it’s McAvoy that holds the film together, as his transformation from wide-eyed idealist to slightly downtrodden realist is as close as the film comes to a significant development.

Surprisingly funny at times and never boring (or enthralling), this well-acted endeavor creates a desire to seek more about Tolstoy. Now, if it had both created and satisfied said desire, The Last Station would have been first rate.

Grade = B