Red 2 (2013)

WARNING: SPOILERS

How did we get to this point? Where this is entertainment? Movie-star relics pretending to be Cold War relics zipping around the globe for a game of hide and seek the weapon of mass destruction?

Let’s take it from the top.

In 1979, a British scientist named Bailey created something, codenamed “Nightshade,” that could alter the balance of power. In Britain’s favor? That’s never raised. For some reason he was ... in Moscow? Am I getting that wrong? He was being guarded by CIA agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) and maybe Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich), rather than MI-6 (am I getting that wrong?), when he was killed, and that was that, until suddenly some top-secret “Nightshade” document pops up on Wikipedia and everyone’s trying to kill everyone. The U.S. government wants both Frank and Marvin dead. Just cuz? Or do they think they’re the leakers? Whichever, they put a hit out on Frank. They hire the world’s top assassin, Han Cho Bai (Lee Byung-hun), and maybe old pal Victoria, too (Helen Mirren). But Victoria proves a pal, teaming up with Frank rather than killing him, while Han plays Kato to Frank’s Inspector Clouseau: popping up throughout the movie and failing to off him. Hi-ya! Later he teams up with everyone to save the world. Or at least London and Washington, D.C. Assassins of the world, unite!

All the old Cold War powers keep bumping into each other and people keeping dying. The U.S., in the form of Jack Horton (Neal McDonough), is particularly interested in keeping Nightshade hush-hush. We watch as Jack kills a five-star general in his Pentagon office when he suggests going public. The U.S.S.R., in the shapelier form of Katja (Catherine Zeta-Jones), tries to seduce Frank, as in days of old, which leads to the subplot of Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), Frank’s girl, wringing her hands over these matters and getting involved in the spy game. Which she totally wanted to do anyway.

I’ll be like the movie and cut to the chase: Bailey (Anthony Hopkins) is alive. He’s been kept in an MI-6 prison for the criminally insane for 32 years. Not because he was behind “Nightshade,” which was really something called “Red Mercury”—which was, and is, a WMD that’s completely undetectable (for now)—but because back then he wanted to use it on the Soviets. Bad form. Drawring outside the lines, as it were.

But why do they have to go to France to talk to “The Frog” (David Thewlis) anyway? Because he has a security deposit key that contains info on ... Bailey? How do they know this? Was it on the Wikipedia page? And why couldn’t they get a French actor for “The Frog”?

No, they go to Paris, because Paris is part of the bang-zoom, ping-pong, zip-a-dee-doo-dah of the movie. They begin at a Costco in Somewhere, America, which leads to incarceration and shootout in New York City, then same in Paris, then same in London, then same in Moscow, then back to London and the Iranian embassy there. By this point, Bailey, that sly dog, has conned Frank and Victoria (into setting him free), Jack Horton (into thinking he’d teamed up with him), and the Iranians (into thinking he’d sell them Red Mercury). But the last con belongs to Frank, who slips the ticking Red Mercury bomb onto Bailey’s plane, which used to be Frank’s, which used to be Han’s, and it blows up mid-air, setting off beautiful colors. And radiation? Are there after-effects we don’t know about? Please.

Overall, Mary-Louise Parker’s shtick gets old, Malkovich’s isn’t bad, and Willis doesn’t really have any. He seems ready for retirement. The Han subplot, meanwhile, is vaguely insulting, while the overall shtick (glib conversations about or while killing people) is vaguely nauseating when you think about it.

I liked Hopkins. He has a great line-reading, almost mumbled: “They really do throw us away after giving them the best years of our lives. Bit of a shame, really.” There’s something in the way he says it. It’s not just glib dialogue. It has ... what’s the word? ... meaning.

—February 5, 2014

© 2014 Erik Lundegaard