RED (Review= Easily Dismissed)

Every now and then, an otherwise "prestige" actor will do the kind of action flick they would never normally bother with, to help pay the bills. John Malkovich did Jonah Hex, Helen Mirren was in National Treasure 2 and Morgan Freeman had more success with Wanted. Now that Bruce Willis has suddenly become an old guy in the estimation of someone or other at the studio, he teams up with these three for another "team" action movie, RED.

These initials stand for "Retired and Extremely Dangerous", the CIA's tag for its old alumni. Frank Moses is one of these men, and when he entertains a squad of assassins in his home late one evening, he goes on the road to find out why his former employers want him dead. He recruits three R.E.D colleagues and a call centre worker who's also got a hit out on her due to her connection with Moses.

Do we consider 55-year-old Bruce Willis as an old man now? I'm not delusional, so I realise he's aged since Die Hard, but really? Maybe it's just because he's alongside older actors like Freeman, Mirren and Malkovich, but I didn't really see it. One thing I will say is that I think he's been making slightly poor choices these days. Surrogates and Cop Out were both missteps and although he probably came off best out of The Expendables, that's because The Expendables wasn't very good.

You can see the appeal for him then, in a film where he's perfectly cast as a retired secret agent who's a lot like... well, Bruce Willis. The problem is that this is pitched as another of those "team" movies that have been so popular in 2010, like The Expendables, or The Losers or The A-Team. This film, like those other films, focuses less on why these guys work together and more on individual moments of awesome. So like all of the other team movies of 2010, it feels disparate.

The other three agents are all very good of course. The lateness of my review for RED means that Bob Chipman has already coined the perfect pithy review of the team dynamic on The Escapist, by comparing the characters to their younger counterparts. It's difficult to extricate Malkovich from the comparison to Jason Bourne, making a comic relief character all the more funny with his wide-eyed paranoia and fearless abandon. Helen Mirren is also great, but you kind of wonder where else Morgan Freeman had to be that meant his presence was so fleeting in this one.

The supporting players come across nicely too. I'd never really heard of Mary Louise Parker until I saw this, but I gather that she's great in TV roles too, reminding me once again that I really need to catch up with The West Wing. Karl Urban is at his scene-stealingest best too, especially in a centrepiece throw down with Willis himself that's brutal and well choreographed and, unfortunately, the only really memorable thing about RED.

Don't get me wrong, it's good enough, but it rambles on like Grampa Simpson about chasing the Kaiser- you don't really know what these people are aiming to achieve, but you're just meant to sit back and laugh. I didn't find it consistently funny enough to entirely cover the lack of plot, and there are a couple of irritating augmentative touches that grate all the way through. For instance, the score comes from a shoddier action comedy than this, and it's obscenely obtrusive. This makes the film sound like Cats & Dogs, of all things.

The hierarchy of team movies in 2010 would go, in order of increasing quality, like this- The A-Team, then The Expendables, then The Losers and then RED. It's the best in a very weak field, and you wonder where these four films came from, to arrive within months of each other as they have. It's directed well, and the actors are clearly having fun without annoying the shit out of the audience in the process. It's Routine, Entertaining, but Disposable.

RED is now showing in selected cinemas nationwide.
------------------------------------------------------------------
If you've seen RED, why not share your comments below? If you're waiting for Willis to do another role like The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable, then believe me, so am I.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

The Horse With No Name- JONAH HEX Review

Here's what plot remains in the studio hack-job that is Jonah Hex- the eponymous Hex is a Confederate soldier turned bounty hunter who can commune with the dead after being left for dead himself by his radicalised comrades. Then the man who killed his wife and child, Quentin Turnbull, re-announces himself after faking his demise, on the eve of a plot to destroy the United States of America, and he sets out for revenge.

You all surely know how big a deal it is when Clint Eastwood directs a Western. He was the iconic Man With No Name in the Dollars trilogy, and behind the camera, he's been responsible for greats like High Plains Drifter and Unforgiven. In Jonah Hex, we have a film I believe to have been made by the Horse With No Name.

That, to me, is the only rational explanation. Whoever put together the film as we see it in cinemas obviously had some ostensible understanding of the genre, and of the DC Comics source material, but no understanding whatsoever of human communication, or of what entertains or appeals to audiences. So why not a particularly experienced equine actor? This seems like the film you'd make if you wanted to get away from being sat on by Clint Eastwood.

The credited director is former Pixar animator Jimmy Hayward, and the screenplay is attributed to Crank creators Neveldine/Taylor. The pair were tagged to direct until they departed due to “creative differences”, and the sheer amount of studio mandated reshoots and schedule changes makes authorship a moot point with this. The horse is merely my scapegoat, as it behooves us to disassociate Pixar from the drop-dead worst film of 2010 so far.

Neveldine/Taylor don't escape blame though- the script, even though the scenes have clearly all been muddled up, is terrible. The plot centres around the dumbest kind of historical allegory involving an anachronistic WMD and the sight of bandits wrapped in dynamite stepping in for suicide bombers. The dialogue is awful too- at one point, we have John Malkovich delivering the line “We will show them that we will do that which we have most assuredly come here to do.” In a terrible Southern accent.

There is no way I'm going easy on this just because the studio went to town on the final cut. There's already enough wrong with it that I'm sceptical this mess of footage was ever salvageable. It feels too long. Even with the whole origin story largely condensed into a poorly rendered motion comic in the first five minutes, it feels too long. Even though it's not asking anything of its audience, it feels too long. Even though it's 81 minutes long, including nine minutes of credits, it feels too fucking long.

Oh, but here's the one really positive thing to come out of Jonah Hex- it feels so long that you'll be checking your watch. And when you check, you'll notice the big hand pass over Megan Fox's 15th minute of fame, spent playing Lila the hooker in this piece of trash. Even for her, it's a thankless role, and without the adolescent goodwill garnered by her semi-annual Transformers appearances, her career's going nowhere but down from here.

I already mentioned Malkovich, but the rest of the cast don't really acquit themselves either. Josh Brolin is fine and craggy as Hex, but he really doesn't have enough to work with to make any kind of impression. I found Michael Fassbender's fleeting appearance more memorable, but that's because he's an actor who makes the most of every role, good or bad, and also because, unlike Brolin, he wasn't unintelligible due to facial prosthetics.

Watching Jonah Hex, I found it really all too easy to imagine a horse demolishing an editing suite, his hooves destroying a keyboard as he tries to edit a love scene between Hex and Lila. He knows what he wants to evoke. He wants to signify why we should care about these characters, and why their relationship is worth a damn. Ultimately, we shouldn't and it isn't. And he's too witless, too unfocused and too utterly inept to make even a tenth of an enjoyable film out of this hash of an adaptation.

The comic has its fans, who've naturally renounced this film version, so there's no blaming the source material. Besides, we know from the example of High Plains Drifter and others that a supernatural film that deploys the codes and conventions of a Western could be awesome. What we get here is a worse version of Wild Wild West. Jonah Hex is not merely bad. It's “I really think a horse might have directed this film” bad.

Jonah Hex is now playing in select cinemas nationwide.
------------------------------------------------------------------
If you've seen Jonah Hex, why not leave a comment on the film and/or my review? If you were hoping for a review of The Last Exorcism, come back on Wednesday- I wanted a repeat viewing today before I gave my review. In a nutshell though, go see that film instead of this one.

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.