At the beginning of Red, you'll notice—you can't help but notice—that Bruce Willis has developed a wattle. As he climbs out of bed in the first scene, his wattle hangs there, under his chin, with a few hairs sprouting out of it, and you have to wonder: I know he's 55, but when did Bruce Willis get old? Thing is, it's a magical wattle: As soon as Willis's character—not that it matters, but his name is Frank Moses—starts killing bad guys, the wattle disappears for good and he becomes smooth, taut Bruce Willis again. Was it CGI? Makeup? A dream?
It's impossible to tell where it came from or vanished to, but Bruce Willis's wattle establishes Red's high concept: A group of retired assassins—they are Retired and Extremely Dangerous, you understand—are targeted for execution by a shadowy government conspiracy that employs a slick and brutal young assassin (Karl Urban, doing a fine, just-following-orders superspy shtick) to hunt them down. It's a fun idea—freely adapted from Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner's violent comic miniseries of the same name—and the filmmakers keep it fairly light and bubbly: Scene changes are identified with a cute postcard motif, a character tosses out a sackful of severed appendages as a sight gag rather than a gross-out, and Willis takes a few self-deprecating passes at himself in the name of cutesy romance. The light tone works everywhere but the score, which is at best pedestrian and at worst a light-funk nightmare with a few stereotypes too many. (I believed we had finally moved past a time in which a scene set in Chinatown would open with a crashing gong; I was, sadly, wrong.)
The rest of the movie tears past in a blur of blatant stunt-casting. (Hey, it's Ernest Borgnine! And Richard Dreyfuss!) The core cast has fun with it, too. John Malkovich essentially plays the Unabomber for laughs, and Mary-Louise Parker takes the standard trope of innocent-normal-lady-who-gets-sucked-into-the-madness and gives it a weird sexual edge; for half of Red, you feel like she's quietly and determinedly getting off in the corner of the screen while nobody's looking.
It's not as smart as it thinks it is, and the climactic caper can't live up to the promise of the film leading up to it, but Red works way more often than it doesn't. If a few plot twists can't help but show their hoary age, so what? If the movie seems to leave a few unexplored ideas to die on the vine, who cares? It's all dumb, zippy fun with just enough edge to keep things interesting. This is the kind of movie we were missing over this past summer's moribund blockbuster season—a few months too late, but desperately eager to please. 
