"Red": Slack Ops, by Kurt Loder

The new movie Red is based on a comic-book series by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner. The comics are hard-boiled and bloody. The movie is…well, it’s a Bruce Willis movie. Which can often be a great thing, but not this time. The story in the comics, which was tight and clear, has been and stretched and spun like pizza dough in order to confect a movie that wobbles in tone from whimsy to action to half-hearted romance, the whole of it heavily seasoned with implausibility. Even Willis, as fine an actor as he is, can’t pull the picture together, so he falls back into default mode, letting his trademark smirk do most of the work. (If you saw him in the equally piffling Cop Out earlier this year, you’ll know what to expect.)

Willis plays Frank Moses, a top CIA assassin now retired and living in Cleveland. One night a new generation of assassins busts into his house and tries to take him out, in the terminal sense. Clearly these goons didn’t read Frank’s CIA file before embarking on their mission -- it lists him as RED: “Retired, Extremely Dangerous.” After retiring his attackers, he realizes he’ll have to find out who wants him dead, and why. So what does he do? Well, Frank’s only contact with the outside world is a woman named Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker), who works in the CIA’s pension department and handles Frank’s retirement checks. They’ve chatted on the phone quite a bit, and Frank likes her voice. So with his house a smoking ruin and who knows what sort of malign conspiracy bearing down on him, Frank decides to drive to Sarah’s home (in Kansas City, go figure), because he figures she’s in danger, too, and needs his protection. Sarah thinks he’s nuts, but Frank overcomes her objections by tape-gagging her and tossing her into his car.

Then it’s off to round up Frank’s old black-ops team, each of them also living in retirement. First stop is New Orleans to pick up Joe Matheson (Morgan Freeman). Joe’s in a nursing home dying of cancer, but slowly enough to still be of service. Next destination is the Florida Everglades, where dwells Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich), a trigger-happy loon so paranoid that the entrance to his house is hidden in the trunk of a car. (Don’t ask.) With Boggs now in tow (along with a big stuffed pig he carries around with him), the crew makes its way to Maryland to pay a visit to a sleek lady named Victoria (Helen Mirren) – “the best wet-work artist in the business,” as Matheson explains.

Now what? Frank knows he’s being tracked by an FBI hardass named Cooper (Karl Urban), but he’s beginning to suspect that the forces arrayed against him are really being directed by someone high up in the government. The next move then: break into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

And so on. Given the ages of the veteran cast -- which also includes Ernest Borgnine, and Richard Dreyfus as an evil arms dealer (a part for which he’s really not evil enough) -- the movie plays out rather like The Expendables, but minus the excitement. Any suspense intended to be generated by the conspiracy plot is continually diluted by the movie’s jokey tone, and by the unlikely romance between Willis and Parker, which keeps blossoming improbably and would have made a better picture on its own. The actors are stranded by the filmmakers’ general ineptitude. Malkovich’s performance is over-the-top even for him, and Freeman seems to be waiting for a call from his agent. Only Parker, as the lonely suburbanite suddenly embarked on the coolest adventure of her life, shines through – she has spunk and energy, and we wish she were in a better film than this one. We wish we were, too.