Just dip our balls in honey & stake us to an ant hill: RED 2

Last month I did a post on the sexiest superheroes and choose Henry Cavill (Man of Steel) as my #1; well move over Superman cause here comes Byung-hun Lee who plays Han Cho Bai,

a deadly assassin with a conscience, in D.C. Comic’s (Retired, Extremely Dangerous) sequel RED 2.

Han is just one of the reasons to revisit this crazy bunch of supposedly inactive CIA Agents: Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich) and Victoria  (Helen Mirren) are all back to their old superhuman tricks and schemes carried out with seasoned skill and lots of luck.

This time the movie opens not with Frank being bored with civilian life, instead it’s his girlfriend Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker) love interest from RED. The two are in COSTCO, Frank’s picking up stuff for their BBQ dinner with Sarah absently munching on a jumbo snack bag of something, looking detached and vacant – trademark MLP.  The action picks up quickly as Marvin enters the picture, trying to convince Frank to help him with a mission, Frank’s reluctant, Sarah’s all too eager.

The plot involves a more than 30 year-old operation called Night Shade that Frank & Marvin were only minorly involved in at the time. Nonetheless, sleeping Night Shade is once again top priority and what Frank and Marvin know or don’t know, put’s them on the must assassinate list.

The original RED was directed by Robert Schwentke, at the helm for RED 2 is Dean Parisot, but it’s the same screenplay writers Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoebe which account for the humor, pacing and stunts in RED 2 being right up there with the original.  There’s plenty of travel, twists, kissing and killing. It would be nice to see an action movie without a car chase, but I have to say, Bruce Willis sliding into old flame Katja’s (Catherine Zeta-Jones) ride.  And Han driving the sexy till she dies Mirren/Victoria while she shoots 2 big guns, one out each window, in slow motion are both hot scenes. On a side note: Zeta-Jone’s face is oddly orange in this movie. She will always be attractive, but it seems she’s losing her charms as a femme fatal.

Mirren has far less screen time in RED 2, it becomes Parker’s vehicle, a running theme of the movie involves Marvin teaching Sarah CIA behavior, much to Frank’s displeasure. Or Sarah messing up an operation or using her feminine wiles to fix things; all the while loving every moment of danger and intrigue. I saw Mary-Louise Parker interviewed on Conan and she told a story about Bruce Willis killing a bee for her on set with his prop gun, apparently the blanks hold enough charge to kill an insect. Anyway, when she was talking about how hot she thought that was and how manly she finds Willis, she seemed genuinely a little smitten with him.  I do think their chemistry on screen is very cute.

Unfortunately, my review from the first movie was written for The Philadelphia Film Society and they have gotten a new blog site since 2010, so I don’t remember what I wrote about RED; however, I’m sure it was something to the effect of – this movie was a hoot, hope they make a sequel – and see, they listened. By the way, did Morgan Freeman’s character die in the first one? I can’t recall.

LAMB Score: 4 out of 5