new to video: Red 2

Red, written by Jon and Erich Hoeber and released in 2010, was a good movie.  Red 2, also written by the Hoeber brothers, and released last year, has a few minor merits, but for the most part, is pretty lousy.  The difference in quality -- mostly on the script level -- is so blatant that it's almost difficult to believe that both movies are written by the same guys.

The first film told the story of a group of assassins and secret agents classified as RED -- Retired, Extremely Dangerous.  Struggling to integrate with normal society, these spies were suddenly thrust back into the world of espionage when, for mysterious reasons, they suddenly became the targets for arrest and termination.  Led by Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), the disparate group overcame their old age to team up, solve the mystery of who targeted them and why, and defeat the bad guys.

Red 2 repeats this formula exactly, but that's not the problem with the movie; heck, it's more or less expected for action sequels to repeat the formulae of their predecessors.  The problem with Red 2 is that the writers clearly forgot why the characters worked so well in the first film.

The first Red got much of its comedy from two characters:  Frank's love interest Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker) and old colleague Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich).  Sarah served as an audience surrogate, and Parker and the writers got a lot of humor out of her trying to adjust to the idea that the seemingly normal guy she's been flirting with is actually a superspy.  Marvin was by far the wackiest of Frank's colleagues, a paranoid, marginally crazy black ops expert who clearly used to enjoy his job a little too much, and was more than happy to get back in the game.

The opening scene of Red 2 misleadingly implies that the story will follow these characters with a natural progression.  As Frank, Marvin, and Sarah shop in a Costco, Frank eagerly embraces the banality of civilian life, Marvin laments "you haven't killed anybody in months!" and Sarah, having learned to accept and even embrace Frank's superspy identity in the last film, is now bored and confused by his "Mr. Normal" persona, and is eager for another adventure to break the mundanity.  All of this is mildly amusing, and makes sense when taken in context with what has been established about these characters.

But once the story gets going in the next scene, the characters of Marvin and Sarah each do a complete, and completely inexplicable, about-face.  Aside from some occasional mugging for the camera on the part of Malkovich, Marvin is more or less played straight in the events that follow.  Sarah, on the other hand, who had been established by the first film as the "normal" woman in the midst of chaos, becomes some kind of thrill-seeking lunatic throughout the rest of the movie, not only repeatedly defying Frank's pleas to remove herself from danger, but also upping the ante by engaging in car chases and gun-fights.  It's a one-joke premise, but the writers can't even decide what that one joke is -- is it that she's hopelessly out of her element and a constant screw-up, or is it supposed to be that she's surprisingly a good fit for Frank's world of espionage and explosions?  At other times, she's depicted as a jealous shrew, whining endlessly about the fact that one of Frank's enemies (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones) is one of his former lovers.

With her character written with such wild inconsistency, Parker makes matters worse by over-acting outrageously.  I accused Malkovich of shameless mugging, but at least he knows how to do it and when.  Parker's performance is more of an exercise in scratching fingernails on a blackboard; her character, apparently, is supposed to be annoying.  The writers need to learn that the concept of "comically annoying" characters is a difficult one to pull off, and here they fall into the obvious trap:  Sarah isn't annoying in a funny way, she's just plain annoying, to the extent that you repeatedly wonder what Frank sees in her.  It really cannot be overstated how thoroughly irritating the Parker character is in this movie; she pretty much ruins the whole thing, as she, in all of her maddeningly vexatious glory, is in nearly every scene.

And then there's the Anthony Hopkins character.  When I first heard that Hopkins was joining the cast of Red 2, I thought he'd be an excellent fit, and it's true that, in the few scenes where Hopkins is allowed to act like a normal human being, he brings a touch of class to the proceedings.  Unfortunately, the writers decided that his character would have a couple of screws loose, and then Hopkins decided to play this aspect of his character as broadly as possible, and so in addition to Parker's unsuccessful comically annoying Sarah, we have Hopkins's equally unsuccessful, comically crazy Doctor Edward Bailey.  Now, I won't argue that Hopkins doesn't have a comedic bone in his body, but slapstick and wackiness ain't exactly his forte, so to cast him in a role better suited for Peter Sellers is a miscalculation of head-scratching proportions.  It's as if the filmmakers wanted John Cleese and then said, "might as well get Anthony Hopkins, they're pretty much the same person, right?"  At one point, Hopkins even does a Cleesian silly-walk.  It really, really doesn't work.  Who was in charge of casting this thing?  Hopkins may be a great actor, but that doesn't mean he's right for just any role.

But at the risk of redundancy, Hopkins's miscasting is nothing compared to the wreckage of Parker's character, and if I'm going on about it a bit too much, then you're getting an idea of how much I hated her in this movie.  I'm not saying she's a bad actress; I enjoyed her in The West Wing, for example, and even in the first Red movie. But the character's many flaws so dominate the film that it's impossible to enjoy the movie's escapist qualities as an action comedy.

Hey, I have an idea for the storyline to Red 3:  Frank Moses is out for revenge because an enemy from his past killed his girlfriend!  Oh don't bother with the admonitions, she's a fictional character, remember?  Besides, if you see this movie, you'll understand what I mean.