RED 2 (2013)

Red 2 arrives three years after its predecessor, a sequel to a comic-book adaptation, and it does what sequels do: reassemble the assets and send them to Europe. Bruce Willis looks tired. The film's business is a portable nuclear device left over from the Cold War, and its method is a tour of London, Paris, and Moscow conducted at a brisk clip with occasional explosions. The classification of such a film is a modest exercise. It has no sermon to deliver and no thesis to defend.

On the matter of representation, the ensemble is more varied than the 2013 action market strictly required. Helen Mirren kills men in diners and looks magnificent doing it. Lee Byung-hun plays a contract killer with a grievance and a sword, and the film never once remarks on his heritage, which is either a quiet virtue or simply a lack of interest. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Brian Cox fill out the roster. Mary-Louise Parker's Sarah graduates from hostage to operative, seducing an ambassador and joining the crew in Caracas. None of this is framed as a statement. It is casting, and the film lets it be casting.

Elsewhere the ledger is blank, and the blankness is honest. The nuclear device is a plot mechanism, not a parable about the planet. There is no economic critique, no historical revision, no advocacy of any kind. Anthony Hopkins performs his asylum physicist as a jittery cartoon, which is a performance choice, not a diagnosis. The film's only consistent position is that old people can still shoot straight and that retirement is overrated. We are left with a breezy, mildly exhausted caper that preaches nothing and means nothing, which in this line of work is almost a relief.