Though it promises to be a lighthearted romp about active senior living, the AARP spy flick “RED 2” winds up being more like a subversive plea for the relative joys of death: How bad could the boneyard be compared to sitting through this execrable piece of non-entertainment? Better dead than “RED 2.”
Bruce Willis, doing a nightclub comic’s impression of Bruce Willis, is back as Frank, an ex-CIA assassin who is (as we learned in a peek at his classified file in the original, much livelier and funnier 2010 film) considered Retired, Extremely Dangerous.
This time he and John Malkovich’s wacky sidekick Marvin learn that a Web site has leaked their names as being responsible for Project Nightshade — the placement of a nuclear weapon in Moscow in 1979. Off we go on a round-the-world jaunt to solve the mystery of what happened to the rogue nuke, to clear Frank’s name and to see what Malkovich looks like in funny hats. At one point he puts a bowl of fruit on his head. Guys, Jerry Lewis just called to say your shtick is tired.
Another top American spook (Neal McDonough) decides he needs to capture Frank and torture him for more details. But he blows that off and tries to just kill Frank out of spite.
Frank’s girl Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker) interjects with whiny-girl complaints (whyyyy, she wonders, can’t she ever do professional hit-man stuff? Not that she is one) and goes shopping in designer stores when Frank has been drugged. It’s like James Bond having to drag around Carrie Bradshaw. Also she keeps reminding Frank that the two of them need to work on their relationship, usually when bullets are flying.
And I do mean fly: They soar like hawks, or eagles, always comfortably over Frank and Marvin’s heads while they keep bantering. Really, the movie would be over if one of the hundreds of disposable assassins who line up to present their butts for kicking would just bend down and fire at the boys while they duck. Or if any hit squad would just assign one summer intern to keep a lookout behind to make sure no one shoots them in the back while they’re licking their chops about finally killing Frank.
What’s most horrible is the violence directed at innocent scenery. At one point a snitch and wine snob called the Frog (David Thewlis, appearing to his everlasting shame) has Frank and Sarah directly in front of him at a cafe in Paris, but instead he fires at the ceiling. Since the Frog can, as we have been told, be bought off with a nice bottle of wine, why the elaborately dull chase scene up and down the Seine?
And why is Catherine Zeta-Jones playing a Russian ex-girlfriend of Frank’s? As for Helen Mirren — not unalluring in a long fur coat stuffed with automatic weapons — why would her character, a British government assassin, keep dead bodies around her home? Mark it down to UK austerity policies, I guess, but you’d think MI6 wouldn’t leave its best killers to dispose of bodies by pouring lye on them in their bathtubs.
Mirren (despite a regrettable scene in which she spoofs her habit of playing queens) does slightly less mugging than the Americans, which is a relief, and Anthony Hopkins manages at least not to be too annoying as the scientist who designed Nightshade and is now, for a super-genius, surprisingly lax about keeping track of his prize creation.
“Red 2” is a movie featuring actors in their 60s and lame one-liners from the ’80s aimed at I.Q.s in the 70s. It isn’t good, it doesn’t pretend to be good, it isn’t trying to be good. It’s just a mass-produced industrial product, like the half-digestible salisbury steak TV dinner it’s made to be half-watched in front of.