Hollywood have made a habit out of churning out a particular type of film in recent years. Made with big budgets in the hope of even bigger returns, they use the phrase ‘all-star cast’ to get the turnstiles clicking. As far as filmmaking goes, it’s purely commercial and, to be frank, pretty uninspired.
Dean Parisot’s Red 2 is no different, taking some of the more marketable oldies around – Bruce Willis, Mary Louise Parker, Helen Mirren and John Malkovich – and getting them to recreate the success of the first instalment a few years ago, this time joined by Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta Jones.
Picking up where we left off, retired CIA agent Frank Moses (Willis) is determined to settle into anonymity with Sarah (Parker). But neither of them want to admit that things are already getting a bit stale in the absence of rattling gunfire. On cue, Marvin resurfaces and so does an old case involving a lost nuclear device, and the Frank is labelled a terrorist for his role in it. Suffice to say, it’s no minor trifle. Frank, Sarah and Marvin are on the run and are now hot targets for assassination. Among those assigned to pull the trigger are a distinguished Korean hitman, Han (Byung-hun Lee), and their old bud, Victoria (Mirren). Of course, she isn’t going to submit to orders and with a heads-up, the lot of them hop around the globe to see if they can stop it going off.
It would be easy to dismiss this as an $84 million waste of time. Going with the motto, ‘bigger is better’, Red 2 (penned by Jon and Erich Hoeber and based on Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner’s Marvel characters) can never be accused of being dull or slow, but they might have gone a bit too big. We’re supposed to be watching a comedy as well, and the moments of brilliance, most involving the central trio of Frank, Sarah and Marvin, are too few to sustain 116 minutes of carnage. It even seems like there is too much at stake here and as result, the light-hearted touch gets put to the wayside in favour of an earnest plot and a lot of superfluous stunts.
About ten good punch lines short of possible redemption, the success of this film is mostly due to the cast itself. As resident tourist, Parker is an absolute hoot, Wills and Malkovich have a nice oddball duo dynamic going and Anthony Hopkins brings some real class to proceedings. But there’s no doubt this is a sinking ship and the less said about Helen Mirren’s rare turkey the better.
Red 2 is on national release from August 25 through Hopscotch Films.
