Red’s Meagre Comedy Left Me Blue

Red

I never thought I would say this but I am tired of comic book inspired movies. As an avid comic book reader I should love Hollywood’s desire to adapt everything under the sun to the big screen, but I just cannot sit through the junk anymore. The Walking Dead series has shown that graphic novels are better suited for television format than they are for feature films. A television series allows time to properly develop plot and characters; both of which are often lacking in film adaptations. This is most evident when watching films such as Red.

Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is a retired C.I.A. operative who spends most of his days on the phone chatting up Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), a customer service representative. Without warning Frank is targeted for extermination by the same agency he once served. In order to figure out who is behind all of this, Frank enlists the help of his former team (Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, and John Malkovich). Although removed from the front lines for several years, Frank and his pals are about to teach the new breed of C.I.A., including William Cooper (Karl Urban), that whole habits die hard.

Red is one of those action comedies that exist on the sole premise that it is funny to watch old people shooting big guns. Unfortunately, the one-note joke becomes old rather fast. Once you get pass this point there is not much that the film actually offers. It is merely a string of action set pieces held together by the odd one-liners here and there.

While it is fun at times to see the likes of Mirren and Malkovich channelling their inner action hero, there is nothing that really bonds you to the characters. Everyone is fairly one dimensional, more than you would have expected from this type of film. Malkovich is the weird paranoid one, Willis is the love struck action hero, Mirren is the cool and deadly killer, etc. Half the time you end up questioning why Willis even needed to pull the whole team together in the first place? Morgan Freeman’s Joe is the most useless character in the whole bunch. His only real purpose is to show that legends should not rot away in a retirement home.

Even when Red tries to provide some depth, via the loved story between Frank and Sarah, the film falls flat. It is very telling when the brief love arc between Helen Mirren’s Victoria and Brian Cox’s Ivan is far more interesting than one of Frank and Sarah relationships around which the film centres. The subplots do not fair any better. The information regarding William Cooper’s family life is not enough to explain his actions in the latter half of the film. Also the whole storyline between the characters portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss and Julian McMahon is never properly developed and feels tacked on in the end.

Red is a film that entertains in short spurts but ultimately does not offer anything that will not be forgotten once you leave theatres.

Piranha Meal Deal A Bit Fishy

Piranha

Why do major studios spend big money to make B-movies? Attempting to recapture that “it’s so bad that it’s good” appeal which certain B-movies have is rarely achieved by today’s standards. Sure there have been exceptions, most notably Black Dynamite and, to a lesser extent, Machete. Yet more often than not the films end up being plain silly. This is evident when you watch films such as Drag Me to Hell, My Bloody Valentine 3D and the recent release of Piranha.

After living for millions of years in a tomb underwater, thousands of fearsome prehistoric piranhas are released after an tremor occurs. Fortunately for the piranhas there is plenty of food available as the tremor just happens to coincide with the annual Lake Victoria Spring Break week. Soon sheriff Julie Forester (Elisabeth Shue) and a marine biologist, Novak (Adam Scott) find themselves trying to not only stop the piranha invasion, but attempting to save Julie’s son, Jack (Steven R. McQueen), and the object of his affection, Kelly (Jessica Szohr), in the process.

It is hard to truly classify Piranha as a horror film as it aims to be more of a reimaging of the original Piranha film series. The problem is that the film does not know when to quit. It is like a joke that is no longer funny, yet the comedian is still trying to get as much mileage out of it as possible. For example, a good portion of Piranha is dedicated to spoofing the whole Girls Gone Wild franchise. Besides being several years late in regards to the subject, there is a point where the film becomes the very thing it is spoofing.

Every aspect of the film, with the exception of the plot, is done to great excess. Both the nudity and the violence are so gratuitous that the film ends up being a cheesy comedy instead of a horror movie. Similar to director Alexandre Aja’s previous films, The Hills Have Eyes and High Tension, Piranha has numerous scenes where Aja goes to extremes to generate some form of reaction from the audience. He fills the screen with scenes of the piranhas eating male and female genitalia, severing various limbs, and even a scene where a piranha devours a woman from inside out. Yet unlike his earlier works, these scenes do nothing more than causes fits of laughter instead of screams of terror.

If anything, the most shocking thing about Piranha is the cast that the film manages to pull together. Besides Shue, the film features the likes of Ving Rhames, Richard Dreyfuss, Jerry O’Connell, Christopher Lloyd, and even Eli Roth. It is perplexing to imagine what drew them all to this particular film? As neither the plot nor the campy humor is really that appealing. Out of all of the actors, only O’Connell and Lloyd seem to hit the right over-the-top tone that the film aims for. Elisabeth Shue does the best she can with the material she is given, but the fact that someone with her talent even did this film is probably the scariest thing of all.