At The Movies: RED

There are two things I want to get out of the way before I start telling you about the film today.  Firstly:

*** There are spoilers in this!***

Oh man.  Three things, then.  Three things.  Second thing is, I am a dangerously massive fanboy for Warren Ellis.  I don’t really like going into a film already biased either for or against its artistic merits, but I was practically eating my own face with anticipation for this one.

And thirdly, I am also madly in love with Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman.  Helen Mirren is so badass I don’t know if I want to be her best friend or be her.  Morgan Freeman’s voice alone turns me into a glowing pillar of delight.  The mere fact that they are near each other, in the same shot sometimes, in RED (they’re on the poster!  Both of them!  Simultaneously!) is like cinematographical manna from heaven being fed directly into my brain through a glee tube.

So please remember that this film was seen through the eyes of what was basically a person fully transformed into a ziggurat of pure fandom; an obelisk of moist-eyed admiration.  Consequently, any words that have issued from my fingers as I type this have been vetted for inappropriate levels of fanboy, but I can’t promise that I’ll have caught all of them.  I can promise, however, that I have done my best.

But first off – and I’d really like to get this out of the way, because I think we all noticed it, didn’t we – there’s one scene that made me actually shout “NO!” in the cinema and made people look at me in disgust (sorry, Vue Cambridge!).

Okay.  The scene is this: Helen Mirren’s character, Victoria, gets shot in the abdomen in such a way that she genuinely thinks her life is at stake, and she prepares for a final showdown, unarmed and bleeding from the gut, and then! a man saves her.  He literally sweeps her off her combat-booted feet and whisks her off to safety.

This is a cliché that we have ingrained into our social consciousness as thoroughly and as needlessly fictionally as “frogs turn into princes when adequately tongued.”  “Woman cannot save self; man saves woman.”  At least the frog-kissing trope doesn’t then translate across into how people commonly regard frogs.  But this “women are crap and need saving” bollocks translates, doesn’t it?  You get it everywhere, from fairytales to adverts; this pointless, condescending infantilism.  This is a point at which I would like to refer you to Bill Bailey’s magnificent “Beautiful Ladies” song, which tears the piss out of this trope perfectly.

Beautiful ladies, in emergency situations!
Beautiful ladies are lovely, but sometimes they don’t take care
They’re too busy with their makeup, or combing their lovely hair
To take basic safety precautions.

The most aggravating thing about it is that – well, okay, some viewers may find that it made the re-emergence of this cliché less annoying – Helen Mirren kicks fourteen types of arse in this.  She has a free-mounted machine gun.  She blasts her way through waves of drones with John Malkovich meekly in the background handing her more guns.  She explicitly changes out of her heels into a nice pair of combat boots to handle the violence.  She knows surgery and hides guns under flower-arranging.  So, for me, to have her punctured and enlimpened like a party balloon just made me want to cry.

And then she SMASHED STUFF

That said, I was so delighted by her character that I was genuinely pleased that she’d been saved, rather than sacrificed.  So the getting-saved-by-a-man was more pleasing to me than if she hadn’t, and been left to die, but she’s an epic-level character!  She shouldn’t be shot down by a faceless NPC¹ in the first place!

So there’s that.

On the whole, though, RED absolutely delighted me.  The dialogue is hilarious, the action sequences beautifully shot and choreographed, and the whole thing is a visual feast.  The characters are chunky and believable – yes, including The Girl, the love interest, the object of obsession – and while they’re all deeply flawed in some critical respect, they’re likeable.

Let’s take Bruce Willis’s character, Frank.  He’s the hero.  He’s badass in pretty much every respect, but his treatment of The Love Interest, Sarah (Mary Louise Parker), at the beginning is absolutely repulsive.  We are right by her side when she makes a bid for escape – it doesn’t matter if what he says is best for her and that we’ve seen his house shot to pieces, the fact of the matter is that he has BROKEN INTO HER HOUSE AND KIDNAPPED HER.  As she says, “You can’t just go around duct-taping people”.  And we can absolutely sympathise with her.  She’s just an ordinary person.  And you can’t just go around duct-taping people.

I actually loved her to bits.  She felt like someone I knew, and the scene where she brazens her way out of a Situation In A Lift is a spectacular testament to how ordinary people can rise to a challenge.  She’s great.  Also, that’s a very gratifying example of her saving Frank.

Interestingly, this film was given an opportunity to pass the Bechdel Test.  Sarah and Victoria are left alone in the snow, while Victoria takes aim at some kneecaps with a sniper rifle.  They discuss Frank.  And then Victoria threatens to kill Sarah and hide the body.  So it had this whole assenting-to-trope/subversion thing going on.  The opportunity was there! But sadly missed!  But I think it also does just go to show that a film doesn’t have to pass the Bechdel Test to also have brilliant female characters in (and visa versa: Sex And The City 2 springs to mind…).

Because it does, you know.  It’s not just Sarah and Victoria (HELENNNN) that are brilliant in this; a tiny bit-part background character with no name gets held at gunpoint by John Malkovich’s marvellously paranoid Marvin.  He declaims her as following them, and having a gun in her handbag.  This is awful; she is terrified and shaking, and Marvin is the bad guy.  And then, it is revealed that yes, she was following them, and yes, she does have a gun.  It is a rocket launcher.  And if that’s not brilliant, I don’t know what is.  The gun-wielding grunt role isn’t just restricted to the men in this film.  And that’s good.  I’m up for that.  Let us have equal opportunities in both our heroes AND our villains.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• The dialogue is hewn from purest diamond genius
• The characters make sense and are, despite their flaws, readily engageable-with
• There is a real estate agent with a rocket launcher
• It looks edibly good
• HELEN MIRREN.

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• Helen Mirren gets shot and has to be rescued by a man and that is boring
• Helen Mirren doesn’t play all the roles

1. Non-player Character for the non-nerds. I’m sorry, everyone. [↩]