'Red': Retirement with a bang

Hollywood has had its fair share of obsessions: vampires, superheroes and heists, to name a few. But what’s up with this new fad, the bring-back-a-bunch-of-old-dudes action flick? First “The A-Team,” then “The Expendables” and now “Red,” which features ancients like Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Brian Cox and Richard Dreyfuss. Turns out, old folks still know how to have fun — if you hand them a gun (or 10), that is.

Bruce Willis plays Frank Moses, ex-CIA, ex-black ops, ex-super agent. Nowadays, though, he’s busy popping multivitamins and flirting over the phone with Sarah (a still sprightly Mary Louise-Parker), the woman in charge of his pension checks. His plan to meet up with her in Kansas City is only slightly derailed by a bunch of masked assassins who show up at his house and spray the walls with bullets. Frank gets away but, realizing that anyone associated with him could also be in danger, decides to turn his first date with Sarah into an abduction — for her own safety, of course. Whoever is trying to kill him means business. Guess it’s time to get the old crew back together again.

And so “Red” turns into a road-trip movie, complete with stylized postcards (“Welcome to New Orleans!”) for each city that the arbitrary plotline takes our AARP adventurers. The first person Frank gets on board is Freeman, now counting his days in a retirement home with terminal liver cancer. Next comes Malkovich, who lives in a hole. Mirren and Cox join the team as well.

All the while, the bad guy, played by Karl Urban (no relation to Keith) is busy chasing our heroes and gunning them down. He’s got the same steely eyes and emotional depth as a well-trained cyborg. Not that Willis’ performance is incredibly impassioned either: He practically sleepwalks through the whole film. This movie is probably the easiest paycheck he’s ever earned.

Luckily, “Red,” which is based on a comic book, never actually tries to be anything more than two hours of fun, self-aware silliness. Action scenes are hilariously wacky. Willis walks out of a still-spinning car that has just been T-boned, guns blazing. At one point baseball is played with a grenade.

John Malkovich is the highlight of much of the action, showing up as a haggard and loony old man who carries around a pink stuffed pig. He’s certainly a welcome burst of energy and volatility in the otherwise predictable storyline of “Red.”

Yet while the organization and explanation of the sequence of events is much in the fashion of Liam Neeson’s “Taken,” (i.e., nearly non-existent), the conspiracy behind the killings here doesn’t just involve the mafia but rather the CIA itself, defense contractors and some federal government bigwigs. Perhaps a political statement is being made about our intelligence agencies. Maybe “Red” reflects a growing American suspicion of the behind-closed-doors, secretive nature of the top brass.

Or maybe the movie is just what it is: a lighthearted action-romance where we get to see Hollywood’s grandpas and grandmas shoot big guns and make things explode.