Entertainment

Granny get your gun!

John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren offer a little, uh, social security for their fellow CIA retiree Bruce Willis when he suddenly comes under attack by spooks still working for the Agency. (
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John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren offer a little, uh, social security for their fellow CIA retiree Bruce Willis when he suddenly comes under attack by spooks still working for the Agency. (
)

Once in a great while, a film comes along that tenderly describes the aging process in all of its bountiful golden wisdom. But who wants to see that? “Red,” perhaps the first CIA-AARP flick, fits seniors with grenade launchers instead of slippers. I say it’s about time.

Defying box-office wisdom (the kind promoted by studio executives too young to remember Jimmy Carter), the film is likely to be a profitable exercise for an action comedy whose age scale runs from old (Bruce Willis) to really old (Morgan Freeman) to Ernest Borgnine.

Willis is a lonely Cleveland codger who has developed a crush on a clerk (a very funny Mary-Louise Parker) at the Social Security office. She sends him checks and he pretends to lose them so he can keep calling her back. She wants to go to Chile. Has he ever been there? Er, yes, well, but he doesn’t remember much about it. “It was dark,” he says.

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He’s a little quicker on his feet when his former colleagues at the CIA drop by to redecorate his house with bullets. Figuring the death squad will probably try to eliminate the girl, too — death squads can be really mean — he finds it necessary to kidnap her first, answer questions later.

And, with Parker waxing deadpan all the while (“not my best first date. Not my worst”), we’re off on a romp around the country to figure out why the CIA is trying to kill one of its own honored vets, which Washington politician has secrets to hide and whether it’s possible to hop out of a car that’s spinning like a roulette wheel. (Answer: Yes, if you’re Bruce Willis, but we already knew there’s nothing the man can’t do except grow hair on his head.)

Casting matters, and I for one have no problem believing John Malkovich as a conspiracy-minded maniac who took LSD every day for 11 years as part of a psych experiment. (“In that case,” Parker says, “he looks great.”) Morgan Freeman as a lecher? That’s cool (although he doesn’t get enough to do). And Helen Mirren is as deadly as ever, but for once she gets a chance to slay people not with a raised eyebrow but with a machine gun. Arranging flowers and pulling triggers, she shows us exactly where Martha Stewart meets John Rambo. The ferocity in her eyes suggests she’s mentally mowing down whoever talked her into doing “National Treasure: Book of Secrets.”

“Red” — the title turns out to be a sly joke — doesn’t bother much with making its action scenes workable (whenever there are a dozen highly trained assassins in the room, Willis is somehow always behind all of them). The comedy is a bit too broad in places and the laughs gradually get drowned out by the nonstop fusillade of the last act.

But, cute as it is, much of it is smart, too. A scene in which a secret dossier kept in maximum security turns out to be filled with redacted pages is such pure self-negation that it summarizes the whole depressing history of the CIA. Some of the sillier stunts are no less absurd than the ones in “Salt,” but are presented with a twinkle in the eye that makes them much more fun.

“Red” has more snappy joy in store than practically all of last summer’s busted blockbusters, and it’s as zippy on its feet as a third-grader. I look forward to a sequel in which, I hope, the “Red” gang will school those humorless old dopes from “The Expendables.” The losing team buys the winners dinner — at 4:30.

kyle.smith@nypost.com