Red

RED is a silly, ultraviolent, pulpy action picture that features Dame Helen Mirren in a slinky white evening gown.

I know.  I had you at “Dame Helen Mirren in a slinky white evening gown.”  Now, try this on: “Dame Helen Mirren in a slinky white evening gown, wielding a machine gun.”

Woof.

Here’s the story: Bruce Willis is a retired CIA covert ops guy.  For reasons that will be revealed later, the CIA decides that he and his buddies all need to die, and quickly.  Well, as we’ve learned in The Losers, The Expendables, and The A Team, it’s always a bad idea to try to kill off covert ops guys – they can kill back.

So what?  What differentiates this from the other three “superduper commando teams solve the mystery and kill a bunch of people” movies that came out last year?

Um.  Helen Mirren.  Slinky white evening gown.  Machine gun.

Ok, there’s more to RED than Dame Helen Mirren mowing down hostiles while clothed in a slinky white evening gown.  Bruce Willis is a natural movie star who’s just plain fun to watch.  His team is made entirely of outstanding actors: Mirren, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Brian Cox, even James Remar and Mary-Louise Parker.  We also get the Great Ernest Borgnine in a crucial supporting role and Karl Urban and Richard Dreyfuss as villains.  We’re talking about serious wattage here: these people know how to own a movie screen.

And it works.  All that charisma carries RED’s wafer-thin story for a solid hour and a half of gunfire, ‘splosions, and a brand of carefree murder so blasé that we cease to think of the targets as characters and see them as the stuntmen they are.  Red turns out to be silly, fun, anarchic, and a great time at the movies.

I just wish I’d seen it on the big screen.

Dead Snow

Everybody hates Nazis.  Everybody hates zombies.  A movie about Nazi zombies - what’s not to love?

Dead Snow has at least a platoon’s worth of Nazi zombies.  They menace a group of medical students at a retreat in a cabin in the Norwegian woods, one of whom is sufficiently self aware to observe, “Can you even guess how many horror movies begin with a group of students spending a weekend at a cabin in the woods?”  The zombies love to decapitate, eviscerate, and (hey, it rhymes) gesticulate, and they do it in pretty much that order.  Of course, the students fight back.  Some of them even survive, for a while.  One guy cuts his forearm off, a la Evil Dead 2, but forgets to attach a chain saw to the stump.  Another, well, let’s just say that if you’ve ever dreamed of seeing a man dangle from a cliff on the large intestine of a member of the fascist undead underground, then this is the film for you.

No, nothing about this film is visionary or original.  It appears to be the work of a guy who set out to make a slick horror film using all the touchstones of the genre.  He gives it a fun twist with the Nazi zombie thing, but you can almost see him checking off the blocks: “Cabin in the woods – check. Horny, half-drunk college kids – check.  Creepy exposition dude – check.”  And so on.  But if you like that kind of thing, if you like over-the-top gore and silly gags and all those horror tropes, you’re going to have a good time with Dead Snow.  Just look at the cover art.  You’ll know exactly what you’re getting.