RED

Directed by Robert Schwentke. Starring Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Karl Urban, Mary-Louise Parker, Richard Dreyfuss, Ernest Borgnine, Brian Cox, James Remar 12A cert, gen release, 111 min

The enjoyable RED sees the old school firing on all cylinders, writes Donald Clarke

I’VE JUST run down a long alleyway, climbed noisily over a chainmail fence, stabbed an Alsatian in the eye and wrestled three Hungarian assassins into bloody submission. I’ll tell you what. I’m getting too old for this game.

Of course, I haven’t really done any of those things. This is our attempt to convey the flavour of an action genre that has become absurdly hard to avoid over the past few decades.

Was it ever thus? In the 1950s, did, say, Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney and Rudolph Valentino – then 30 years past their prime – gather together for One Last Mission? They did not. Aside from anything else, they were all dead.

One side-effect of increasing longevity is the rise of this strange, not altogether unwelcome class of grey-hair thriller. Think The Expendables. Think Die Hard 4.0. True, we have, over a dozen movies, grown a little tired of seeing Clint Eastwood clutch the small of his back and, once again, declare that he is no longer suited for such shenanigans. But most sane folk would, surely, prefer to sit through an oldies flick rather than something starring Hayden Christensen.

Anyway, the latest entrant to the genre features a genuinely impressive array of high-grade talent. Bruce Willis (wry), Morgan Freeman (resigned), Helen Mirren (exasperated), John Malkovich (mad), Richard Dreyfuss (evil), Brian Cox (stoic), Ernest Borgnine (fleeting): even Harry Potter would struggle to secure such quality actors so far down the cast list.

RED, which, rather wonderfully, stands for "retired and extremely dangerous", begins with Willis (a mere 55, remember) fuming in impatient and unappreciated retirement. He is so desperate for company that he tears up his pension cheques to generate telephone conversations with the nice girl (Mary-Louise Parker) at the insurance office's help desk.

Bruce was, of course, once something nasty in the CIA. Just as he is contemplating visiting Ms Parker in Kansas, some of his old contacts return to blow his brains out. He annihilates most of the enemy and, before long, in an echo of the slightly underappreciated Knight and Day, finds himself drawing the blameless Ms Parker into his increasingly cacophonous adventures.

The remainder of REDis played out in three modes. The most enjoyable sequences find Willis wandering about the country and shaking his old friends out of their aged torpor. The least successful scenes are those in which the writers fail to explain the unnecessarily convoluted and supernaturally boring conspiracy plot: something about atrocities in Guatemala and a compromised vice-president. The noisiest episodes find the gang hoisting ever-larger bazookas onto their weary shoulders and eliminating ever-more persistent helicopters.

The Expendableswas a film that, hard as you might try, proved very difficult to like. One found oneself wishing that the dialogue was just a little more pungent, that the acting was a tiny bit less wooden, and that the story made just a jot more sense. Though overly repetitive and only about a quarter as funny as it thinks itself to be, REDlooks like the answer to those prayers.

These are proper actors and, even when saddled with the slimmest of material, each knows how to create a character with a degree of depth and a modicum of nuance. (Don’t expect any more than that, mind.) Willis remains adept at conveying a singular class of suppressed annoyance, Freeman does fatalistic reserve better than anybody and Mirren proves happy to embrace the slightly patronising caricature of the Game Old Bird.

REDis based on a DC comic and, as directed by the solid Robert Schwentke, it encourages its stars to heighten and amplify personae they have been cultivating for decades. The film does run out of steam in its second hour, and its increasing larkiness ultimately becomes wearisome, but that odd combination of willing pensioner and bold, energised visuals proves surprisingly easy to digest.

There are worse ways of paying off that last Saga holiday.