Red 2

RED 2, the action-comedy sequel to the popular original, brings back our team of retired CIA operatives using their old-school style to take on new enemies all across Europe. This safe bet of a sequel features a cast of friendly and bankable stars, resulting in a breezy romp of global espionage and superhero superspies. The abundance of violence is played for laughs while the sly grins remain firmly planted on the faces of everyone involved.

As fans of 2010's RED will fondly remember, the hero characters are from the AARP generation, which also drives the primary conceptual joke and defines the title acronym: Retired, Extremely Dangerous. In this round, former secret agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) is drawn out of retirement by his former cohort Marvin (John Malkovich) to handle a plot that involves a Cold War-era nuclear bomb hidden in Russia and the international effort to retrieve it. Frank is now romantically partnered with RED's sweet Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), who wants to follow him into the fray and turns out to be pretty good at the dangerous game of spycraft. Also returning from not really being retired are the icy MI-6 assassin Victoria (Helen Mirren) and the lusty Russian spy chief Ivan (Brian Cox).

New to this edition is Katja (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Ivan's best operative and a former flame of Frank, and Han Cho Bai (Byung-hun Lee), a Korean hit man on Frank's list. Everyone's motives are purposely muddled, but they all put aside personal grudges and professional kill orders to join forces against the doomsday device, created and hidden by a batty professor who's been locked away in a London psychiatric hospital for almost 40 years, played by Anthony Hopkins.

The mechanics of the story don't much matter when the purpose is zingy one-liners and spot-on comic timing. There's a ton of bloodless violence, played for laughs, and a menacing American agent, played by Neal McDonough, who seems to be the only humorless one in the whole bunch. All the leads are given their own scene-stealing moments, with each playing according to their strengths. The physical and verbal interplay among them cascades trippingly off the tongue in snappy dialogue and bits of business that seem effortless for these pros. The RED franchise is a nice crossover success, with a built-in audience of the over-50 set, and the core youth demographic happy to watch grandma- and grandpa-types blow up and shoot things to their hearts' content.

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