{"id":1021,"date":"2010-11-23T09:00:42","date_gmt":"2010-11-23T09:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=1021"},"modified":"2013-05-31T16:56:42","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T15:56:42","slug":"at-the-movies-red","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2010\/11\/23\/at-the-movies-red\/","title":{"rendered":"At The Movies: RED"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are two things I want to get out of the way before I start telling you about the film today.\u00a0 Firstly:<\/p>\n

*** There are spoilers in this!***<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh man.\u00a0 Three things, then.\u00a0 Three<\/em> things.\u00a0 Second <\/em>thing is, I am a dangerously massive fanboy for Warren Ellis.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

And thirdly, I am also madly in love with Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman.\u00a0 Helen Mirren is so badass I don’t know if I want to be her best friend or be her.\u00a0 Morgan Freeman’s voice alone turns me into a glowing pillar of delight.\u00a0 The mere fact that they are near each other, in the same shot sometimes, in RED <\/strong>(they’re on the poster!\u00a0 Both of them!\u00a0 Simultaneously!) is like cinematographical manna from heaven being fed directly into my brain through a glee tube<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I can promise, however, that I have done my best.<\/p>\n

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!).<\/p>\n

Okay.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He literally sweeps her off her combat-booted feet and whisks her off to safety.<\/p>\n

This is a clich\u00e9 that we have ingrained into our social consciousness as thoroughly and as needlessly fictionally as “frogs turn into princes when adequately tongued.”\u00a0 “Woman cannot save self; man saves woman.”\u00a0 At least the frog-kissing trope doesn’t then translate across into how people commonly regard frogs.\u00a0 But this “women are crap and need saving” bollocks translates, doesn’t it?\u00a0 You get it everywhere, from fairytales to adverts; this pointless, condescending infantilism.\u00a0 This is a point at which I would like to refer you to Bill Bailey’s magnificent “Beautiful Ladies”<\/a> song, which tears the piss out of this trope perfectly.<\/p>\n

Beautiful ladies, in emergency situations!
\nBeautiful ladies are lovely, but sometimes they don’t take care
\nThey’re too busy with their makeup, or combing their lovely hair
\nTo take basic safety precautions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The most aggravating thing about it is that – well, okay, some viewers may find that it made the re-emergence of this clich\u00e9 less annoying<\/em> – Helen Mirren kicks fourteen types of arse in this.\u00a0 She has a free-mounted machine gun.\u00a0 She blasts her way through waves of drones with John Malkovich meekly in the background handing her more guns.\u00a0 She explicitly changes out of her heels into a nice pair of combat boots to handle the violence.\u00a0 She knows surgery and hides guns under flower-arranging.\u00a0 So, for me, to have her punctured and enlimpened like a party balloon just made me want to cry.<\/p>\n

\"Image:

And then she SMASHED STUFF<\/p><\/div>\n

That said, I was so delighted by her character that I was genuinely pleased that she’d been saved, rather than sacrificed.\u00a0 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!\u00a0 She shouldn’t be shot down by a faceless NPC1<\/a><\/sup> in the first place!<\/p>\n

So there’s that.<\/p>\n

On the whole, though, RED<\/strong> absolutely delighted me.\u00a0 The dialogue is hilarious, the action sequences beautifully shot and choreographed, and the whole thing is a visual feast.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Let’s take Bruce Willis’s character, Frank.\u00a0 He’s the hero.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As she says, “You can’t just go around duct-taping people”.\u00a0 And we can absolutely sympathise with her.\u00a0 She’s just an ordinary person.\u00a0 And you can’t<\/em> just go around duct-taping people.<\/p>\n

I actually loved her to bits.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She’s great.\u00a0 Also, that’s a very gratifying example of her saving Frank<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, this film was given an opportunity to pass the Bechdel Test<\/a>.\u00a0 Sarah and Victoria are left alone in the snow, while Victoria takes aim at some kneecaps with a sniper rifle.\u00a0 They discuss Frank.\u00a0 And then Victoria threatens to kill Sarah and hide the body.\u00a0 So it had this whole assenting-to-trope\/subversion thing going on.\u00a0 The opportunity was there! But sadly missed!\u00a0 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<\/strong> springs to mind…).<\/p>\n

Because it does, you know.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He declaims her as following them, and having a gun in her handbag.\u00a0 This is awful; she is terrified and shaking, and Marvin is the bad guy. \u00a0And then, it is revealed that yes, she was <\/em>following them, and yes, she does have a gun.\u00a0 It is a rocket launcher.\u00a0 And if that’s not brilliant, I don’t know what is.\u00a0 The gun-wielding grunt role isn’t just restricted to the men in this film.\u00a0 And that’s good.\u00a0 I’m up for that.\u00a0 Let us have equal opportunities in both our heroes AND our villains.<\/p>\n

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n