Aging Action Heroes, Having a Ball

If you enjoy watching older people fire machine guns, Red 2 is the movie for you. It opens tonight (July 19) in theaters everywhere.

The core team from Red (2010) returns in the sequel: John Malkovich (almost 60)  is the paranoid and wacky Marvin. Helen Mirren, 67, again plays the murderous Victoria. Bruce Willis, 58, is hero and team leader Frank Moses, with relative spring chicken Mary Louise Parker (almost 49) as his ditsy but adorable love interest, Sarah Ross.

Parker’s Sarah, who worked the phones as a client service agent for US government retirees in Red before getting caught up in Moses’ adventures, turns out to be a prodigiously gifted secret agent in Red 2. Sarah’s unlikely talents for interrogation and gunplay are the least preposterous things about Red 2, which is, like its precursor, utterly preposterous.

In films such as Red and Red 2, bad guys are relentlessly efficient killing machines — until critical moments involving our heroes, when they suddenly can’t hit the broad side of a barn with even one of hundreds of rounds. The secret lower reaches of the Kremlin are accessible through a hole knocked in a thin tile wall of an adjacent Moscow pizza parlor, and no alarms go off. A stash of Russian army uniforms — including one that fits Parker like a tailored Armani suit — just happens to be handy in said catacombs when our team needs them. Likewise, apparently bullet-proof Porsches, Bentleys, helicopters and jet planes are available at just the right moments. No one ever seems to call the police while gunfights go on in the streets of Paris or London or Moscow, unless our team happens to need the cops for escape cover. A crack CIA assault/rendition squad forgets that you’re supposed to (A) thoroughly search your arch-villain prisoner before (B) handcuffing him behind his back and then (C)  not falling asleep while guarding him. But if Red 2’s supremely incompetent CIA operatives had done these obvious things, evil Dr. Edward Bailey couldn’t (A) access his universal handcuff pick, (B) get the nerve gas out of the heel of his shoe, (C) administer the antidote to himself, (D) kill everyone on the CIA plane, (E) land it undetected in England, (F) plant his apocalyptic Nightshade device in London and thus provide our team opportunity to Save the World.

Anthony Hopkins, by the way, plays the arch-villain as an old don who uses his doddering charm to disarm those who would thwart his diabolical schemes. Works every time.

The plot of Red 2 does not so much strain credulity as beat it into a coma, but you’re not supposed to care. Screenwriters Jon Hoeber and Eric Hoeber and director Dean Parisot expect explosions, gunfire, great-looking clothes, exotic locales (most of them reproduced in Montreal and London), snappy one-liners, star power, snappy one-liners and actors having fun to be distraction enough. Did I mention the snappy one-liners? A lot of them, especially Malkovich’s, are pretty funny.

You know what? The formula pretty much works. The special effects are lots of fun, and you don’t worry too much about the collateral damage — it’s easy to imagine the dead and wounded dusting themselves off after the director yells “cut.” Hopkins and the hero team — plus Byung Hun Lee as a cold-eyed assassin who turns out to have a sense of humor and a heart of gold, and gorgeous Catherine Zeta-Jones as a sultry Russian spy — take their characters over the top and have a wonderful time doing it. The point of the film is to have vicarious fun along with them. They’re all fun to watch, but none more than Mirren and Malkovich, she because for steadfastly refusing to wink, nod or mug and he for refusing to ever stop winking, nodding and mugging.

You never have to tell yourself that Red 2 is only a movie. It tells reminds you of that in every frame, and a certain odd charm lies in that. And if that’s not enough:  Helen Mirren, in a speeding car, blazing away with two guns? Sweet.