Movie Review: “Red”

Plot:     A team of retired secret agents embark on an impossible, cross-country mission to break into the top-secret CIA headquarters, where they will uncover one of the biggest conspiracies in government history.

Cast:     Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Karl Urban

Rating:     PG-13

Bottom Line:     ***

 

 

By Laurence Washington

 

Die Hard Bruce Willis stars as an ex-CIA agent Frank Moses who has been tagged as “RED,” which refers to his alert level (“retired: extremely dangerous”) by the agency. The film, which attempts to answer the question, is older better, opens up with a black ops hit team invading Moses’ home at night. Although, there are about 10 members of the hit squad trying to kill him, they don’t stand a chance, because in Die Hard fashion, Moses eliminates them one-by-one.

 

Now Moses is on a mission to discover why the CIA  wants to kill him. So he begins to assemble the members of his old hit squad – Joe Matheson (Morgan Freeman), Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich), Victoria (Helen Mirren) and Ivan (Brian Cox.) Moses also takes along Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker),  telephone operator at the CIA that oversees his retirement plan who he has fallen in love with. The conspiracy trail, littered with thousand of spent automatic bullet casings, leads all the way to a vice president with connections to a huge private defense contractor. I guess it serves here that the Vice President (Richard Dreyfuss) looks suspiciously like former VP Dick Chaney. I wonder if it’s by design because Chaney makes such a wonderful villain? So is older better? We’ll let’s just say the young punks in this film learn the hard way that seniors can still kick some butt.