Better Dead Than RED 2.

A bunch of stunts and car chases got together and called itself RED 2.

It convinced Bruce Willis and John Malkovich to reprise their roles as Frank Moses and Marvin, ex-CIA Retired-Extremely-Dangerous overactors, “indicating” their way through this spy comedy. Movie also convinced Helen Mirren to reprise her role as the most dangerous wetwork queen bitch, given a contract to kill Bruce and Malko, her best pals. Bryan Cox returns, lusting after Helen. And Mary Louise-Parker returns as Bruce’s delicate civilian love interest, so that I may lust after her.

There’s also a plot of a WMD about to be loosed on the world, so Frank and Marvin must find the eccentric professor who built it (for reason unknown). You lost me at why anyone cares about or listens to these old queens if they’re off the grid and about to be whacked. And who is the professor? Well, whenever a character in one of these ensemble movies is introduced by first seeing the back of his head, it’s always a case of speculating on which A-lister was conned into taking a cut in pay to be in this ensemble cast. Turns out the professor is Anthony Hopkins, conned into taking a cut in pay, so therefore, acting while giving only half a rat’s ass.

Forever pursuing Frank Moses – Neal McDonough as a CIA spook, who gives way too much of a rat’s ass. I mean, can you just leave these retired people alone for a second, CIA muttonhead? Maybe you’ll discern that killing them will accomplish nothing. And maybe you’ll keep all the bones in your hands and legs intact.

Catherine Zeta-Jones turns up, Russian spy, kisses Bruce in front of Louise-Parker. Now L-P jealous, but not enough to make it interesting. L-P, so hot and sensual, empathetic, caring, using the weapons she knows best in combat – breaking people by kissing them instead of shooting them. Now she make Bruce jealous. But not enough to make it interesting.

Apparently, it’s funny cos they’re old…

Who is responsible for this garbled mess? Director Dean Parisot (from the enjoyable GALAXY QUEST to the mediocre FUN WITH DICK AND JANE 2005); but more than the director’s fault – the editor, Don Zimmerman. It seems amazing that Zimmerman worked on those same two movies, as well as other A-List titles that never exhibited the haphazard piecemeal approach he effects with RED 2. Shots appear at random after the scene is over, reaction shots that go nowhere, mean nothing; further shots after the button has been pushed on a scene; a hodgepodge of meaningless angles after the point of the scene has been made, etc. After his body of good work, Zimmerman seems like he’s getting too old for this shit, as in apathetic. He could take a few lessons from the editor of CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER. Or maybe from a 7-year-old.

David Thewlis is a French spy called The Frog (and no one sees this as racist because…? American movie?); and Byung-hun Lee is the agency’s premier assassin who somehow can’t kill Frank Moses because – I don’t even care anymore.

One of the stupidest lines: Frank yells to Marvin during a gun battle, to take Frank’s girlfriend to safety, “Get her outa here!” To which Marvin asks, “When?” Frank’s yelled reply, “Now!” When someone says get her outa here during a gun battle, doesn’t it imply NOW? What did Marvin expect the answer to be: “In ten minutes”? Who wrote this redundant piece of idiot dialogue? Turns out, the same two guys who wrote the first movie. Now they’ve figured out how to phone in scripts.

Y’know, movies like RED 2 are the reason why Liam Neeson quietly usurped the Action Hero crown from Bruce Willis. It’s not so much that the movies themselves are bad, but that Willis is also bad in them, forcing his comedic shtick like amateur hour.

Eventually we just get sick of this many idiots firing automatic weapons and hitting this much nothing. Especially when their target – our heroes – are right in front of them and they don’t shoot AT them but fire warning shots into the air, and then AFTER the hero takes cover do they start shooting AT the hero’s location in earnest…. My head’s about to explode with how many times the bad guys have the drop on our heroes and DON’T shoot them.

Don’t make the same mistake with RED 2, Movie Maniac. When you see this movie – shoot to kill.

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Red-Blooded American Funtime.

A shoot-em-up, rock-em sock-em age-fest.

RED is Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman; they’re ex-CIA, Retired Extremely Dangerous. You betcha – each of these operatives could wipe out whole cities: Willis with his arctic cool, Malko with his leering morbidity, Helen Mirren with her sexagenarian sexiness and Morgan Freeman with his pompous voiceover.

The four principals have more years between them than all the stars of HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL combined. Ironically, watching HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL can kill you faster than any RED.

From a DC Comics graphic novel (by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner), RED follows Frank Moses (Willis) as he evades CIA operatives sent to kill him, led by Cooper (Karl Urban). It’s easy to evade bad guys in movies who still can’t aim after all those years of CIA training. Yes, it’s the yawn plot device of CIA trying to kill its own ex-operatives. Frank recruits his old team mates to get to the bottom of why. (Why? Because it’s the CIA, stupid! That’s what they do.)

Cooper culls Frank’s file from curmudgeonly CIA analyst, Ernest Borgnine (that guy’s still alive?!).

Poffy goes RED

Beautiful Mary-Louise Parker is Sarah, a cubicled government accountant who dwells romantically on her spy novels, merely a phone flirtation for Frank, until he inadvertently pulls her into the chase and she finds herself on the lam with an All-American Hero more virile than any Fabio-based cover model. Her wonderment, amusement and sensual excitement are pitch-perfect, with just that right dash of spinner cuteness. Positively glowing.Brian Cox is The Russian Guy. Was Rade Sherbedgia busy? In forbidden love with Helen Mirren. (Who isn’t in forbidden love with Helen Mirren?..)

Suddenly – Richard Dreyfuss! He’s a slimy weapons contractor (cough–Halliburton) who uses the CIA as his personal hit squad, under orders from the vice president — oh, so this is culled directly from the desk of the real-life Dick Cheney (Dreyfuss played that low swine in W.); here, the VP is Julian McMahon (appropriately, Dr. Doom from FANTASTIC FOUR, and the real-life son to a former Australian Prime Minister, William McMahon).

RED is solid action-comedy that doesn’t take itself too seriously, yet seriously commits to delivering cheeky China White straight-to-the-vein outlandish bombast. Just how drunk was the stunt coordinator who thought up the eye-popping gag of Willis stepping from a spinning car, guns aimed and blazing? And how uber cool (and sexually arousing) is Helen Mirren pumping an automatic machine gun or Bruce Willis in hand-to-hand combat beating up on some guy half his age?

Of course, the mindless action would be immaterial were it not punctuated by the personalities of the principals; Willis, Malkovich, Mirren and Freeman armed not only with guns that never run out of ammo, but a dry, deadly wit that only comes with the accumulation of years that these red-blooded wolves have spent howling at the moon.

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The Shooting of an Olde Worlde Epic by a New World Filmmaker.

This classical western draws us into 1800s Americana so richly that we feel our teeth rotting from lack of dentistry not invented yet.

Written and directed by Andrew Dominik (from a book by Ron Hansen), THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD is a study in authenticity; the set dressing, weaponry, music, the arcane vernacular of the characters, even the wordy title itself transports us back to grainy film and honky-tonk pianos, thrusting us bodily into the grimy, wild, paranoid frontier that was romanticized beyond its harsh reality.

Dominik’s photoplay is a deconstruction and a rambling paean to a bygone era. And, at 160 minutes, way too long for the iPod generation…

Jesse James (foreboding Brad Pitt) is already a legend when we meet him. Nineteen year old Robert Ford (whining Casey Affleck) is obsessed with everything Jesse, collecting and poring over every dimestore paperback featuring the outlaw, now starstruck that he rides with the man himself. Vouched for by his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell), Robert comes onboard a ragtag new James Gang assembled for one last job by Jesse and brother Frank (mighty Sam Shepard).

Even Jesse senses there is something peculiar about Robert’s hero worship: “I can’t figure it out: Do you wanna be like me – or do you wanna be me?”

A tragic, insecure, yet dangerously ambitious runt, Robert Ford wants the fame that riding alongside the infamous Jesse James will bring. When the gang fragments and Robert finds himself still a nobody, he sees one last stab at fame in being Jesse James’s assassin.

A narrator lifts passages directly from the Ron Hansen book that inspired the film. Not only is there an ancient poetry in the words: “…and the omens promised bad luck which moated and dungeoned him,” the accompanying scenes look like 1800s photographs, with the edges of the screen blurred. There is so much detailed thought that has gone into making this movie experience an ancient wonder that–

–it is almost a pain to watch!

You heard me, Movie Maniac. ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES seems to come at us through a time warp from the 1800s, as every aspect that elevates it also detracts from its “modern” enjoyment. It might be called “controlled direction” but we can also say that events unfold in this movie with the rapidity of swimming through tar; we can call it challenging to listen to the olde worlde vernacular, but most of the time, it is ear-strain, and I had to turn on the English subtitles (“for the hearing impaired” – that always gets me!) if I was ever to decipher their jargon: “I’ll say, How come an off-scouring of creation like you is still sucking air when so many of mine are in coffins? I’ll say, How did you get to reach your 20th birthday without leaking out all over your clothes? And if I don’t like his attitude, I will slit that phildoodle so deep he will flop on the floor like a fish!” Without subtitles, you ask yourself, “Did he just say what I thought he said?”

ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES is very successful at creating the paranoia of Jesse and all those around him, Jesse unceremoniously killing ex-gang members if he caught a whiff of betrayal in the air. He may have been the prettiest of the gang, but he was also the most unbalanced, prone to mood swings that would make a high maintenance girlfriend look almost sane.

Though the film’s title suggests Jesse James was an honorable man betrayed, we realize its irony in the film’s depiction of Jesse as a wary coward himself, so paranoid that he would stoop to any lengths to stay one step ahead of the law or the people who might betray him, not averse to torturing young boys for information or shooting friends in the back.

This is not a shoot-em-up western, yet all the violence is sudden and unflinching, therefore more dreadful than the glamorized violence we’ve grown inured to. The realism of the guns sounding like cap pistols and head-smacks sounding like bone on meat makes us realize how much fantasy we’ve been listening to all these years, from the cannon reports of FISTFUL OF DOLLARS to the wet-towel punches of any John Wayne west-fest.

On April 3, 1882, Robert Ford shot Jesse James in the back of the head. Jesse was not wearing his guns.

For a while, Robert Ford seemed to get what he wanted, as he became more recognizable than the president, touring with a stage play recreating Jesse’s final moments, with his brother Charley playing Jesse and Robert reprising his own ignominious role.

Only after Jesse’s death do we realize this tale is Ford’s point of view, as the movie continues for another half hour in a world where Jesse James is dead. Robert’s star would rise in the aftermath of the killing, only to plummet as the Legend of Jesse James grew into romanticized pulp.

By the time Robert Ford was shot down himself for being the “coward who shot Jesse James” – by a nobody named Edward O’Kelly – his spirit was at such a low ebb that he welcomed it.

An ambitious movie, with power names on the production credits: David Valdes (UNFORGIVEN), Brad Grey (THE DEPARTED), Ridley Scott (AMERICAN GANGSTER), and Brad Pitt himself; DP Roger Deakins (NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN); music by Nick Cave – even a cameo by Clinton dogsbody, James Carville, playing an iron-fisted governor, of all things. Andrew Dominik brings back epic, emotional filmmaking to this world stunted with Transformers and Iron Men.

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