RED 2 is the perfect Blu-ray to put on while you’re doing something else. It seems literally designed for that. You could skip whole scenes and miss nothing, and even if you paid attention to it you wouldn’t get anything more. That’s just fine. It’s a kitchen sink movie, with so much thrown in that it’s utterly forgettable, yet endearingly passable.
Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is trying to enjoy retirement with Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), but Marvin (John Malkovich) warns him something big is happening. Frank can’t avoid it when both his old friend Victoria (Helen Mirren) and an assassin from his past (Byung-hun Lee) are sent to kill him. They have to find something called Nightshade and all sorts of new characters are introduced with something to do with or some interest in Nightshade, including an old flame of Frank’s (Catherine Zeta-Jones).
It all happens very fast. I mean, 11 minutes into the movie and they’re already on the mission. Every scene is so short it’s really like a series of highlights, but it’s breezy, bouncing around a lot of locations. Man, it must’ve been expensive to move a film crew around the world for each two minute scene, but it gives the sequel more energy than the original, which felt more like fits and starts.
Action breaks out randomly because they’re being followed by so many people. At least it looks like there are some real stunts. Clearly not all of them, but some may have been real. God, is that what we settle for now? There’s no real danger because the characters have taken blasé action personas to a point where they literally know they won’t die, but it’s okay. It’s fun and light. Most importantly, it actually looks like Bruce Willis is in the scenes they shot for the movie, which is more than I can say for A Good Day to Die Hard or the Expendables movies.
Director Dean Parisot at least has some sense of using the frame. Frank will pull killers out of the frame, and that’s not even Willis doing anything but it builds up his heroic factor. Every once in a while they’ll actually use the environment for the action, like a file room with potato chips on the floor, or a minimart where Lee fights with a refrigerator door. Usually it’s just a lot of people ducking gunfire when the gunmen never aim at the ground. Mirren with guns is cool but she’s always shooting guys who are either bewildered or physically reloading, so Victoria is hardly a deadly markswoman.
The whole movie is schtick and every scene is a bit. The sense of old friends on business against each other is cute but never really leads anywhere since there’s not going to be any moral gray area here. Frank being flustered by Sarah’s ambition for adventure isn’t really that cute. The characters keep talking about Frank and Sarah’s relationship but it’s not so much of a throughline as it is a gimmick. Sarah has some growth I guess. Victoria poses as a kooky character for one scene and they meet the inventor of Nightshade (Anthony Hopkins) who is now a crazy old scientist.
RED 2 is coasting on a lot of good will. I want to enjoy it. It’s my genre and my people. I’m going with it. If I waited another day to write this review, I probably couldn’t do it, but that’s why I’m Fred Topel. I make sure to document RED 2 for you. If there’s a RED 3 I’ll give it another chance, but if there’s not, Franchise Fred will move on.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
