Movie Review: Red

Ah, retirement. You work for 30 years, loyally serving the company. One day your services are no longer necessary and they hand over your gold watch and send you on your way. You take up model trains, buy a motor home, or grow flowers.

Then one day they send a team to kill you.

At least, that’s what happens if you’re an old spook like the characters in “Red,” opening today.

Bruce Willis is Frank, a former super-secret black ops stealth guy who now spends long days knocking around his empty house. His only connection to the outside world is a customer service girl named Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker). Every few weeks, he pretends his pension check is lost so he can chat with her. That’s all fine and dandy until the day some assassins show up while he’s pottering around in his bathrobe. There’s no rest for the weary. He must kill them all.

It’s that pesky “Guatemala incident” rearing its ugly head.

Since whomever sent the death squad must know about Sarah from tapping his phone, Frank has no choice but to rescue her. She’s less than thrilled at being rescued. In what must surely be the worst first date ever, he ties her up, seals her mouth with duct tape, and bundles her into the car. Someday they’ll look back on it and laugh.

Enlisting the help of his R.E.D. (Retired: Extremely Dangerous) colleagues, Frank carves a trail of destruction across the country in the hopes he can neutralize the threat, expose a bad guy, and finally take the duct tape off Sarah’s mouth.

Joe (Morgan Freeman) is busy keeping the nurses hopping at his retirement home. He’s more than glad to seek death out instead of waiting for it to come to him. Marvin (John Malkovich), who was the subject of LSD experimentation in The Agency, hides in the swamp. He’s not paranoid. People really are out to get him. Perhaps the most lethal member of the team is Victoria (Helen Mirren), who hides her murderous skills behind her grandmotherly flower arranging ways.

Frank also teams up with former opponent, KGB agent Ivan (Brian Cox), but not until after a great scene where the two sigh about the good old days when spies were spies and assassins were assassins. They spent the best years of their life trying to kill each other. Cox comes to this role honestly. He has appeared in a 2008 movie also named “Red” as well as “Red Eye,” “Red Dwarf,” “Red Fox,” and “Red Cap.” Also something named “Blue/Orange.” It’s good to have a specialty.

It’s also good to have Bruce Willis back. Kudos to him for acknowledging his age and slyly poking fun at it instead of denying it (ahem, Harrison Ford). When he calmly shoots his way out of burning, exploding buildings or squints his steely glare into the rearview mirror, you remember what fun he was on the silver screen in his heyday. John Malkovich, as always, adds his own special flavor as a befuddled, crazy old man whose wild paranoia keeps being proven correct. And let’s just say Helen Mirren knows her way around a machine gun and looks good doing it.

Rated PG-13 for intense scenes of action violence and brief strong language, the film keeps clean for the most part. The film could have used a bit more mayhem and a bit less Mary-Louise Parker. It’s at its best when the old fogeys are dancing around the youngsters. Age, apparently, has its rewards.