I find it odd
that a big-budget actioneer like RED is being
released in the sort of pre-Oscar glory days of November. At
its heart the film is as Morgan Freeman’s character Joe
Matheson claims a story about "getting the band back
together." The band in RED of course being a quartet
of retired government spies. May action-schlock right?
Wrong, RED (based on the comic book by Warren Ellis),
though peppered with the sort of banal actioneer crap that
could land it in the big budget doldrums of the summer, is
an action film with a live beating heart amidst the
high-powered rifles and assassins.
Review - RED
Frank Moses is
a retired killer, a super-spy known for tossing governments
and single-handedly starting wars. He lives in a small house
in a small town where his neighbors put up lit reindeer at
Christmas. When a sextet of killers bombard his house, in a
spectacularly machine-gun heavy sequence, Frank goes on the
run to save his lady love (a pension drone played with able
quirk by Mary-Louise Parker) and find out just what’s going
on. Along the way he picks up a few REDs (retired and
extremely dangerous) and whammo, let the action set-pieces
roll.
Get this straight now, this isn’t a film that covers any new
ground, it is at its heart a story of conspiracy and spies
writ large on the action stage. The cast though - John
Malkovich (as a pig-carrying nutter), Helen Mirren (who
still makes me sweaty), Brian Cox and Morgan Freeman to say
the least - anchor the film so steadily, that a host of
surprising emotions and concepts bubble to the surface.
There’s a scene in the film where Victoria (Helen Mirren’s
striking assassin character) is baby-sitting Sarah
(Mary-Louise Parker). The FBI storms in and the at times
annoyingly clutzy Sarah stumbles down a hill in to the mass
of gun-toting soldiers. The look on Victoria’s face, a sort
of mash of 'should-I-stay-or-should-I-go' highlights the
extra bit the film has to offer. The way Schwentke holds the
camera on Mirren’s face as a bevy of emotions flash through
her eyes, shows heart in these heartless characters, justly
filling out an emotional quota most films like these barely
offer.
At the end of the day RED isn’t a poetic reflection
on aging and it’s punctured with a few sizable holes, but
it’s leaps and bounds above the standard action crap oft
times pushed upon these days. Schwentke and his talented
cast finds a deeper emotional river to run down, and though
the film never truly finds it’s own unique rut, it glows,
quite warmly, above its solidly emotional core.
Noah Sanders is the blog/news editor at Light In The
Attic and a contributor at Sound On The Sound and
the KEXP blog. He also has his own
Criterion-based film site, Criterion Quest.
If you'd like to contact Noah in regards to his
writings here at Side One: Track One then please do
so
here.
- Noah Sanders
-
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