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RED

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Hollywood frequently seems to be having the movie equivalent of a key party. Two or three movies in as many months will turn up at the local cinema with the same high concept. This season’s exemplars are The Expendables and RED.

We’ve seen both, and both are more enjoyable than the reviews lead me to believe.

A bunch of guys with large caliber machine guns show up in the middle of a night at Bruce Willis’s house in Cleveland but Bruce is too good to be taken out so easily. He heads to Kansas City to pick up Mary Louise Parker, since he believes she’s in just as much danger. Despite the fact that Willis is a retired CIA agent nag Parker just a pension plan call center phone rep with a cute voice.

The appeal here isn’t the plot, which is reasonably serviceable given the source is a graphic novel, but the pure old pro action comedy skills of an all-star cast. Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Richard Dreyfus, Brian Cox and Willis just slice through this like butter, ably abetted by Karl Urban, Julian McMahon, Rebecca Pidgeon and Parker.

One scene early on, where Willis puts a cop car into a spin, steps out mid-spin into a shooting stance without even noticing the car’s tail end missing by inches impressed me in the trailer. But I was even more impressed when I saw that the movie treated it as nothing special.

Director Robert Schwentke and writer Jon and Eric Hoeber worked the balance between camp and staying true to the spirit of the graphic novel. Besides the scene just mentioned, let’s just say that you have to be really special to use a machine gun as a baseball bat to smash a grenade 100 yards right at a guy who’s shooting at you!


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