I'll start off with saying that I haven't seen a good, fun movie in a while. Seriously, movies are shit nowadays. That withstanding, I really enjoyed Red. It started off slowly, but had great comedic moments and decent action spread throughout.
The story starts off with Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) "enjoying" his retirement by doing the same routine he does everyday...for some reason, in Ohio. He wakes up without an alarm, he eats quietly, and he fakes not getting a social security check just so he can talk to Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), whom he has a crush on. Soon after a few moments into his retired life, a squad attacks his house in the middle of the night. The destroy his house with a hail of gunfire. Well, since its the beginning of the movie, I think you can figure out how it turns out for those soldiers. He then meets up with Sarah and the chase is on.
The first time Moses meets William Cooper (Karl Urban), the agent fixated on bringing Moses down, we are treated with one of the best displays of bad-assery Bruce Willis has ever shown. And then he gets away with some clever trickery. Their fight later in the movie is also rather brutal, which is nice for a PG-13 movie.
The supporting characters all fill out their roles very well. Morgan Freeman is as cool and collected as ever, never really stealing the show, just adding to it. I thought Helen Mirren was going to ruin the movie by being an old hag, but she actually was one of the better parts in the movie. She was fun to watch and deadly throughout. Brian Cox is also in it, which I was unaware of. He was another character who didn't do anything other than produce a few chuckles and offer help, all with a Russian accent.
The real breakout star of the movie was John Malkovich. He played a character that was given "daily doses of LSD for 11 years" so you know he's going to be bat-shit insane. That is exactly what he was, and he did it perfectly. He was highly suspicious of everyone, which produced laughs in pretty much every scene he was in.
As with most movies, everything was pretty far-fetched, but the way everything unfolds is just kind of too convenient for the plot. Also, Sarah's character never seems to care that at any point she could be put in prison for life or killed. Women don't act like that. She is really attractive in the flick though, which is good, because everyone else is old. Even with those little gripes, I had a great time watching Red. I recommend it to everyone, especially if you like any of the actors in this movie.
I do believe that this is the first movie ever that Bruce Willis doesn't use his yelling voice at all. Crazy, I know.
I don't remember my old system, so here is an arbitrary number of my satisfaction
4.5 out of 5
Here's the trailer
