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80Even the more cartoonish performances, like John Malkovich's acid-damaged paranoiac, fit the movie's vision of the vanished, wild-and-woolly heyday of spycraft.
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80Red isn't a great movie, but it's great fun, and if that sounds like damning with faint praise, you take things too seriously.
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75The result is like a sugar rush after a visit to the vintage candy store.
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75Red has more snappy joy in store than practically all of last summer's busted blockbusters.
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75This breezy action comedy is a noisy affirmation that life goes on after 50, that retirement doesn't mean redundancy, and that nobody - young or old - can wear a long cream evening gown like Mirren.
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75It's a lot of fun and, because of the high quality of the cast, there's no need to feel guilty about praising such an inherently silly motion picture.
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75One of those rare action comedies that actually delivers action and comedy.
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75RED is so much fun -- and its Over the Hill Gang so likeable -- that this is one of those rare cases where I wouldn't mind seeing them come out of retirement again for another romp.
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75Red isn't edifying, ennobling, or artful. It's just an utterly satisfying combination of big kicks, cheap thrills and real laughs.
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70The good news is that, while "The Expendables" was the kind of product that should be shown to health inspectors rather than critics, much of Red is jovial and juvenating. [1 Nov. 2010, p.121]
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70All those guys are a blast, and the dark-hearted idiocy of Red is mostly quite enjoyable.
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70To underestimate actors of this caliber -- even in a popcorn action flick -- would be dangerous indeed.
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Not the best. Not the worst. Just the classiest.
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70Only a curmudgeon could entirely resist the laid-back charms of Red, an amusing, light-footed caper about a team of aging CIA veterans rudely forced out of retirement.
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70The best part of Red is the spectacle of terrific actors being terrific in novel ways.
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67There's no denying the kick you get from seeing Borgnine (forever lovelorn Marty to me, when he's not tooling around my head as Cabbie, from John Carpenter's Escape From New York) and company kick ass, take names, and go batshit crazy one last time.
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67It's an amusing geriatric uprising that might just as well be titled "Gray."
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67Part of it is cheap thrills, of course; this is a capable, experienced cast with extensive acting chops, and it's trashy fun watching them descend to the level of the material.
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67RED is a poisoned valentine to the CIA, and that approach, too, is in keeping with its cold-war sentimentality.
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63Red starts repeating itself and spinning its wheels and looking for an ending, well before the ending arrives. The actors have considerable fun with it, though.
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63Excels at bringing on the high-power pyrotechnics.
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63Too long, too busy, too loud, and too reliant on slam-bang stunt work, Red's glib dialogue and sinister government scenarios begin to wear.
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63Unlike "Wild Hogs" or last summer's "The Expendables," this adaptation of the "Red" graphic novel series gets into a cool, sophisticated swing.
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63Red has enough acting flourishes and incidental action pleasures to make it an adrenalin-jacked giggle, if not exactly the romp one so fervently expects.
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60Good fun, and though it breathes hard in the second half, the ensemble has charisma to spare.
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60It's the casting, stupid!
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The film preserves many of Ellis's amoral one liners (best delivered by Malkovich and by Richard Dreyfuss as one of the villains), though as in much of his writing, the fun is discolored by a profound cynicism.
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Unfortunately, while RED's stars may have gotten better with age, its many clichés have not.
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50Red is neither a good movie nor a bad one. It features actors we like doing things we wish were more interesting.
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50The uneven humor, half-baked plot and generic action scenes keep RED from being much fun.
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50"The Expendables" trotted out the concept this summer, and it was good dumb fun - a nudge-nudge wink-wink '80s movie on steroids. RED is more self-consciously wacky, more stridently in your face, and more disappointing.
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50The star turns are Red's raison d'être, with the winking performances filling the place of any credible dramatic tension.
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50Red is an insult to our memories and to our intelligence, an unfunny farce whose veteran cast is cashing a retirement check.
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50Red can't stop itself from trying too hard to be hip. It's not that it doesn't have effective moments, it's that it doesn't have as many as it thinks it does. The film's inescapable air of glib self-satisfaction is not only largely unearned, it's downright irritating.
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50It is possible to have a good time at RED, but it is not a very good movie.
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50Red simultaneously tries too hard and not hard enough.
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40No one is expected to take any of this seriously, so Schwentke keeps things light: light on big laughs, light on unique action set pieces and light on any sense that these game but retired spies are too old for this crap.