Red - 2010

Lots of fun in this loud action toy. :-D I liked it. Red means Retired extremely dangerous :lol:   It starts quietly enough, for a few minutes, with retired Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) throwing away his cheques so that he can call again the girl at the pension department to ask for another one, an excuse to talk to her... but then he gets attacked in his own house, with a big big waste of bullets, and the adventure begins. First thing first he goes to Kansas City to get her because, he reasons, they were monitoring him so they know he likes her, so now she's in danger. Practically Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker) gets home to find him inside, a man she only talked to on the phone but never met is inside her house, acting all normal, and of course she understandably freaks out. He has prepared her baggage, dusted the floor while waiting, and now he ties her up and brings her in the car. She'll feel abducted for a while longer, until the time when she frees herself and calls the police, and the bad guys intercept the call and she's in danger, but Frank comes in time to save her, and from that moment on she'll be a little quieter and he won't tie her up again.
Frank enlists the help of other retired agents: Joe (Morgan Freeman): they catch up quickly: I have a girlfriend (!?!?!); a commando came to kill me. Identify them for me, and Frank gives Joe a few fingers he took from the men that came to his house to kill him.
Marvin (John Malkovich) who seems completely crazy but Sarah's right, if he really got secretely drugged with LSD for 11 years then, wow, he's a flower.
Victoria (Helen Mirren) who like the others didn't find it easy to adjust to retirement. What a marvellous, beautiful woman, I like her very much.
Ivan Simonov (Brian Cox), not exactly a friend of course, but he needs his help to break into the Cia headquarters! Yep, he does! And brings Sarah with him...
Anyway, he goes to the archive where Henry the record keeper (Ernest Borgnine) helps him, then he has a fight with Cooper in order to steal his badge; his fight with Cooper was fun. My poor William Cooper , but to be fair he was still bad at this point. Still, the line "Cooper?? 6 foot tall, cute hair?" was nice :-) "hair was cute" confirms Henry :lol:
So, it would appear that in 1981 Robert Stanton (Julian McMahon) ,now Vice-President of the United States, did some kind of bad mess, I don't remember exactly, maybe he destroyed a village full of innocent people, I really don't know. Because of this, they become convinced that all of this is his fault, that he wants them dead to hide forever what he did. They learn this interrogating Dunning (Richard Dreyfuss), but they are surrounded. Joe sacrifices himself to let them go, but he was ill so maybe in a way he liked it better this way. They run away, but Sarah falls and is taken. Frank wants her back, but most of all wants to be sure she won't be harmed.
It's such an intense scene when Frank calls Cooper and Cooper acts all tough, until he learns that he's calling from his home! "I can't think of anything more horrible than to know that your enemies can hurt someone that you love. The feeling is almost indescribable" - Cooper is freezed with terror: "please..." and of course he promises not to harm Sarah in any way, but as soon as the call stops, he runs to his house with an army, only to find his family perfectly alright, probably didn't notice a thing. Frank could have... but he didn't.
Then there's a whole thing when they try to reach the vice-president, and a lot of agents in charge of his protection are killed for nothing, let me tell you, because they weren't the bad guys, but in movies like this nobody cares about them. At the end of all that waste of bullets, they abduct the vice-president and propose a swap: him for Sarah. It turns out it wasn't Stanton after all, it was Dunning.
Frank confesses to Sarah, not sure if he really wasn't sure he would make it out alive or if it was simply for show: "I tore up all those cheques. I just wanted to talk to you", but realising what has been going on and who the bad guy really is, Cooper helps Frank so all the good guys are safe and sound. Frank has won over his girlfriend, and there are no hard feelings with Cooper :-)
There's a scene that was in all the trailers because it's so cool: silly, even stupid, totally absurd, but in this kind of film it's ok: I love it! Sooo cool, when temporarely-bad-guy William Cooper (Karl Urban) is chasing after Frank right after he saved Sarah, and he hits them with his car. Frank's car starts to turn and Frank simply opens the door and in slow motion he quietly puts a foot on the floor and starts walking on in the road while the car keeps turning behind him, and starts shooting towards Cooper. :lol: it's fun :lol:
It was much more stupid the fact that that woman instead of shooting them would insist on launching rockets at them! Come on, they were right in front of her, a few meters ahead, on foot, and she uses a one-shot device which is so very slower than a gun already in an agent's hand... This was so stupid. Still, probably Marvin's line "old man my ass" is the most popular of the film.
When they investigate together, Sarah talks to Mrs Chan, played by Emily Kuroda. I remember her as Mrs. Kim from Gilmore Girls show.
Ivan was so romantic "three bullets in the chest. When I woke alive, I knew she still loved me. Or else it would have been the head. It was big risk for her, of course, but, one does crazy things for love"