Dear Reader:
Last week, I made the acquaintance of a perky young college professor. He was distressed to learn that I had just viewed SAW 3D – The Final Chapter (2010), for my blog. Apparently, mistaking me for a student, he promptly offered some unsolicited advice. He counseled that I should review “real” movies, and suggested that I see RED, one he had just seen and enjoyed. Trusting, I took his advice. (He seemed cynical enough.) Well, as the saying goes, there is no accounting for taste, even if he did have a Ph.D. in French literature. While the movie may borne a passing resemblance to The Three Musketeers (1844), it was not a classic, not even a French one.
The theater billed Red as an “action/adventure/comedy” movie. That’s a tall order for any picture. It would appear that the producers felt that if they combined sufficient violence, special effects, catchy repartee, and an all-star cast they could pull off this spy-thriller opera buffa. For me, at least, it did not work – not because there were not enough elements, but because they were not the right ones. The critical missing component was style.
The movie is an updated James Bond movie commingled with some popular television situation comedies and movies of the 1960s and 70s. (Sound doable to you?) Our Bond in this case was the affable Bruce Willis. Unlike the Bond portrayed by Sean Connery, Willis was not the suave, sophisticated metrosexual secret agent 007. No, he was a sad, lonely, bald, middle-class, retired CIA hit man we see taking out his garbage in snowy suburban Cleveland. (How far we have fallen!) Don’t look for any martinis in this picture. It’s all shots from here.
Willis quickly teams up with unsuspecting golly-gee-whiz Mary-Louise Parker, who bears a striking resemblance to Susan Saint James of McMillan & Wife (1971-77). (She reads romance novels written by “Susan St. John,” – so clever). Anyway, McMillan & Wife are one step ahead of trigger-happy government agents determined to make Swiss cheese out of the pair. On their journey, they team up with psycho-comic John Malkovich, an ex-CIA agent like Willis. (Now, it really gets good!) The three join forces to become a wacky all-white Mod Squad (1968-73), bent on foiling the forces of evil, in this case the United States government.
A couple scenes and cities later (there is no shortage of post card venues in this production), the Mod Squad teams up with yet two more quixotic ex-CIA agents Morgan Freeman and Helen Mirren to add a little cool and class into what grows into a side-splitting Mission Impossible (1966-73) crew of misfits. If that were not enough, they enlist a cantankerous old KGB crony, Brian Cox, for Mirren to add a little romance to this otherwise sexless picture. (Did I mention missing components?)
There were “memorable” moments in the movie. In one scene Freeman dressed like a Haitian Captain Kangaroo bitch-slaps bad guy Richard Dreyfuss (long overdue). In another, Helen Mirren displayed her feminine firepower dressed in an evening gown and combat boots by outgunning Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) with her automatic weapon. (How far we have come!)
What the actors failed to realize was the way Sean Connery as Bond was able to pull-off those improbable scenes with those fantastic gadgets. He played it straight. It was assumed the audience possessed sufficient sophistication to pick up on the absurdity delivered with such style. Instead, in RED we saw a movie of gags and gimmicks from situation comedy before the dawn of reality T.V. Perhaps, this is what my perky young professor found so novel.
Here's the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fKr4JrCdMw
What the actors failed to realize was the way Sean Connery as Bond was able to pull-off those improbable scenes with those fantastic gadgets. He played it straight. It was assumed the audience possessed sufficient sophistication to pick up on the absurdity delivered with such style. Instead, in RED we saw a movie of gags and gimmicks from situation comedy before the dawn of reality T.V. Perhaps, this is what my perky young professor found so novel.
Here's the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fKr4JrCdMw
From the vault: Goldfinger, (1964). Directed by Guy Hamilton, starring Sean Connery, Honor Blackman, and Gert Frobe. After the first three notes of the title music sung by sassy Shirley Bassey, “Gold-fing-gah!” you will be sucked in. FYI, Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War, it was Sean Connery.
Best of luck in your movie selections. Your faithful friend,
Dwight Dekeyser
© 2010 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq. All rights reserved.
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