Paint the town Red;

Going into Bruce-fucking-Willis' new movie, Red, we were both looking forward to another action packed adventure. Throw in John Malkovich and Morgan Freeman and the stage is set for a comic book adaptation that might be worth mentioning.  Or so they say.

The first half an hour of the movie confirmed our expectations. Guns, bitches and non-existent bling thrown in with some over the top action had us squirming in our seats for more. The movie opens in a house, where we conferred that if it didn't blow up we'd be horribly disappointed. The next best thing happened, whereby house was destroyed by gunfire, leaving Bruce-fucking-Willis to clean up the bad guys and walk away as all good action heroes do, with the house falling to pieces behind him. The movie proceeded to employ one of the best car chase scenes ever devised. Being chased by Karl Urban, Bruce puts the car into a slide, opens the door and steps out, pumping a whole clip into Karl's car as his own car whips around behind him, barely missing his legs. Masterfully choreographed and beautifully executed, it left us begging for more.

It is here that the movie, and theatregoers, cut us down. The introduction of John Malkovich's character had us concerned. He's the perfect actor to play a crazy-crazy guy, who thought the government were doing experiments on the general public when they were actually slipping him LSD for 10 years, but the audience reaction to his idiosyncrasies was painful. He carries around a stuffed pig, that certainly does not contain weapons, which prompted to one particular person in the audience to loudly pronounce "OINK OINK!" and laugh for a good 20 seconds at his own joke. Every time this pig made an appearance, it would be a repeat of that exact joke. Malkovich tried to restore the peace, prompting a couple of great actions scenes, including using a gun as a baseball bat to hit a grenade back to the pitcher and shooting an RPG in mid-air to eviscerate the perpetrator, but all hope was lost by the general dumbassery of the audience, loudly repeating what had just happened on the screen.

"Oh WOW, he just hit the grenade back at the guy who threw it!"

Really? Did he now? I didn't see, as I came to see this movie with the intention of watching with my eyes shut and relying on audience members such as your self to inform me of the action taking place on the screen. It's a wonder these people remember to breath without saying it out loud.

After that disappointing sequence, it was Helen Mirren's turn to destroy our faith in the movie. As our first post suggested, she is the pinnacle of our hatred for this movie. She employs the "Betty White" method of acting, whereby she continues to act as if she were 30 years younger, which is meant to pass for humour these days. She ultimately fails, not being able to convince us that she is still the bad ass she was in her hay-day. She is responsible for the most ridiculous series of events in the film. During the climax point of Act 3, she is inevitably shot. Obviously the one bullet she didn't notice at first makes her useless and she urges Malkovich to go on ahead without her. She then stumbles around for the next 10 minutes, hopelessly bleeding out until she gets to a gate that she can't open. It looks like the end of this pathetic character, that is until the Russian who instigated the action in Act 3 suddenly appears again, with the key to the gate. Obviously she can now push through her injuries and escape. Are you fucking kidding us? I don't even understand how that concept passed the proof reading, let alone conceived in the first place.

Content with creating sequences that are downright unbelievable, the writers again provided us with a scene that made us think "WHY? JUST WHY?". The cast enter a house, to deal some business. Naturally Helen Mirren and the love interest Mary-Louise Parker stay outside to watch their backs and have some "Girl time". Mirren threatens to kill Parker if she hurts Willis. This only adds to the end of movie rage, but lets not jump the gun. Eventually, shit goes down and the FBI move in the and surround the house. Of course, surround the house means they come from EVERYWHERE EXCEPT WHERE MIRREN/PARKER ARE CAMPED OUT AND THE BACK DOOR. Obviously the FBI didn't expect anyone to do something so cliché and it was bumped off the pre-mission brief. This prompts a scene which still confuses us. They are in the house of an arms dealer, but can't find ONE bulletproof vest, leading Freeman to sacrifice himself by having Mirren shoot him to confuse the FBI, giving them just enough time to escape out the back door.

You would think that's the end of the hate, but the writers weren't done ruining the movie quite yet, they also decided to destroy action scenes with their attempt at humour. Urban has a great scene where he runs down a car on foot, leaps onto it, then onto the limo in which Willis is escaping, but they can't have him stopped now, so instead of having Urban roll off the limo like a man or simply miss the jump, they have him slide down the back window, his face pressed up against it telling them to stop the car. You better believe the audience members above repeated this scene out loud and laughed till their heart's content.

This leaves us with the finale and our beef with Parker. At the start of the film, she's outraged when Willis does the vacuuming in her apartment, to the point where she throws a vase at him. She is then nearly killed, tied up and gagged, threatened to be killed by Mirren, who then proceeds to kill Freeman only minutes later and locked up by the CIA, but decides that at the end of the movie, she should hang around with the women who has no issue killing friends and threatened to kil lher, a guy who had been on acid for 10 years and can "smell" a government agent and a neat freak who likes to vacuum. What the fuck kind of thought process leads you to that decision? You're outraged at someone cleaning up after you, but someone says they'll kill you and they're your best friend? There's a scene earlier in the film where Parker is trying to give lip to the interrogator by saying Willis will eat him for lunch. It's delivered with no punch or venom and left us thinking they missed a golden opportunity to reference Happy Gilmore and proving that she is nothing like these people she's going to follow around the country and would be considered dead weight by them. Of course that isn't a happy ending so Willis and Co decide to take the girl with no combat training at all on their next mission without a second thought of the implications.

And that's how Red sparked our motivation for this blog. Stay tuned and tell your friends!