Red (2010)

Directed by: Robert Schwentke

Starring: Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Hellen Mirren, Mary-Louise Parker

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The film industry is lucky  Red came out  shortly after The Expendables. (Read  my review of that train wreck here) If it had not, I might have given up on going to the movies all together. Red managed to redeem the film industry of The Expendables' mistakes, and made me believe in campy-throw-back action movies again.

This is how douchebags say "thank you". 

RED is actually an acronym; Retired, Extremely Dangerous. Bruce Willis stars in the lead role as a retired black-ops CIA super spy. He lives in boredom and mediocrity, with the only joy he gets coming from telephone conversations with a woman who works in a pension office. Rather quickly , his is attacked at home by a band of government thugs. After kicking a few asses and taking a few names, he leaves to find out why the government he worked for is now trying to kill him. Along the way, he pulls a few of his old counterparts out of retirement.

The story isn't horribly original, and it can get pretty confusing, especially in the third act. Red makes up for the weak story line with lots of awesome characters. Of course, Willis is the usual wise cracking badass. Nothing new for him here, but he's good at it. Mary-Louise Parker gets a few good laughs as his reluctant love intrest. Morgan freeman and Helen Mirren are great as another two ex-agents pulled out of retirement.  Karl Urban does very well as the initially cold and calculating government agent sent to stop the REDs, whatever the cost. Out of all of this, my favorite character was played by John Malkovich. He is a mentally disturbed ex-operative, mostly due to the fact that he was fed LSD daily for 11 years when he worked for the CIA.

Seems perfectly stable to me...

Bottom Line: 8/10: Red has its flaws, mostly in the story department. But it sure as hell is fun, with plenty of campy action and fun characters to go around. If you're into action films, don't let this one slip past you. Even if  you thought The Expendables had ruined the gene for you. 

Repo Men (2010)

Starring: Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Alice Braga

Directed by: Miguel Sapochnik 

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Repo Men is a sci-fi film that has a lot of good ideas. It starts out with a very interesting "what if" question, as many good sci-fi films do. The unfortunate thing is, thats the only thing it does well. Almost everything else about Repo Men is mediocre at best. 

Remy (Law) and Jake (Whitaker) work as repossession officials for a large corporation called The Union in the not too distant future. The only thing is, this company sells insanely expensive artificial organs to the sick and wounded. When people get behind on their payments, the repo men are sent out to recover the organs... In some of the most disturbing ways possible. From here, the story takes some very predictable turns. It manages to pull off one surprising twist, but everything else is cliché. It ends up being very disappointing because there is so many directions they could have gone with this- Instead of going for pure shock when organs are harvested in disgusting ways from innocent people. 

Should have gone with the PPO.....

The acting is another problem here. Its incredibly inconsistent. Sometimes Jude Law does a fair job, other times his lines come of as stilted and hollow. Whitaker just seems out of place in this whole film. Some of the secondary actors are much better than the lead cast, however, there are still no outstanding performances in this film. Some scenes are just pure awkward. One in particular involves lots of semi-nude making out, while the two characters slice each other open to scan their artificial organs. It just reeks of some really odd sexual fantasy.

Tarantino's foot fetish suddenly seems a lot less weird. 

Bottom Line: 4/10: It starts off with a good idea that is marred by bad everything else. The story can hold your attention if you're not too grossed out by the gore. There is a plot twist, which I'm not sure was intelligent or cheap...I'll just say it was interesting. Lots of questions are left unanswered, like why it seems that 80% of the population has needed an organ transplant. Don't go for this one unless you really want to... Unless you're a die hard sci-fi buff, chances are you won't enjoy Repo Men a single bit.