Review: ‘Red 2’

I need to write this stuff down now because it will all be forgotten very soon, even though I walked out of this movie just a few hours ago. As “Red 2” started and we get thrust back into the life of retired CIA operative Frank Moses (Bruce Willis, A Good Day to Die Hard), I quickly realized that I couldn’t remember a single thing about the first movie and what that story was about or why anyone did anything or why the characters acted the way they did. It was all a distant blur of a memory of a movie, and it is obvious now that “Red 2,” while entertaining enough, will go down the same path of temporal lobe obscurity.

Frank Moses is still trying to force a life of homemaking with his adventure-starved wife Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker, Fried Green Tomatoes) when wacky Marvin (John Malkovich, Warm Bodies) comes along and gets Frank back into the black ops game, although Frank really didn’t have a choice, seeing as how the two of them were being framed for something that happened way back in the 1970s which means all sorts of people like US government agent of some sort Jack Horton (Neal McDonough, Captain America: The First Avenger), ex-MI6 op and contract killer and returning character Victoria (Helen Mirren, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu), and the world’s number one contract killer Han Cho Bai (Byung-hun Lee, GI Joe: Retaliation) are out to kill them for various reasons.

Hence they embark on a worldwide adventure, much to Sarah’s delight and Frank’s chagrin, looking for the movie’s macguffin (in this case, some sort of nuclear device, cause we haven’t seen enough movies about people looking for one of THOSE things), and that’s pretty much it. There’s a thread throughout the movie about Frank not knowing how to handle a relationship and being afraid of losing Sarah (mostly to death, as opposed to her leaving him), but it’s mostly played up for laughs as the seemingly unstable and evidently single Marvin dishes out relationship advice over and over again, and sometimes with food stuffed in his mouth to make it EXTRA comical.

There is also tons of action, much of it very serviceable, some of it even enjoyable, but it gets pretty redundant towards the end, as they find less inventive ways of staging action and just settle for shoot outs and CG-assisted car chases. None of it is bad at all, it’s just there, action beats inserted in because the plot demands it, and while the stuff in the beginning is fun and interesting, they seem to just lose interest and stick with gunfire. And this is one of those PG-13 movies in which a ridiculous amount of people die very bloodless deaths, usually with guns, so it’s definitely a violent movie, but going for sanitized violence which almost feels more insulting and wrong-headed than actual, bloody gruesome violence that shows the consequences of such actions, instead of just leaving a large body count and not sweating it.

At least “Red 2” has an appealing cast that makes it all go by pretty easily, as it is rounded out with Catherine Zeta-Jones, Anthony Hopkins, David Thewlis and Brian Cox, all of them bringing their own little things to their characters, and really everyone in this movie seems to be having a grand ole time, so everything is just pleasant enough (outside of all the violence).

Or was it? I don’t know, I already forgot.