Julian McMahon (“Fantastic Four” films), Ernest Borgnine (famous for still being alive at 314-years-of-age) Richard Dreyfuss and Brian Cox are all set to star in the all-star cast of “Red,” a D.C. comics film that we probably would just shrug our shoulders at if it weren’t for the fact that, so far, the picture has somehow attracted the likes of Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, John C. Reilly and Mary Louise Parker.
Sounds great, right? Mmmm, not so fast, one of the main producers is Lorenzo Di Bonaventura (“G.I. Joe,” “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” and other pieces of B-movie dreck like “Doom” and “Constantine”) and let’s not forget people, Bruce Willis stars. When was the last time he was decent in anything? (without one of the world’s greatest auteurs around, Willis reverts back to indigenous states of being terrible). Nerd blogs seem to be as excited as pigs in shit for this one, but then again, they also thought the cast for “G.I. Joe” sounded pretty promising at first too. Stars like paychecks too people and even Morgan Freeman is not above slumming it (“Wanted” had a good cast on paper too, look how that ridiculous thing turned out).
Directed by Robert Schwentke (“The Time Traveller’s Wife”), geeks are also excited because this tale of a former black ops agent (Bruce Willis), now in retirement, who has to contend with younger, more high-tech assassins who show up to kill him, is based on a story by celebrated comic book author Warren Ellis (no relation to the beardo guy who works with Nick Cave), but it certainly won’t be the first or last time Hollywood fucks up a coveted comic-book adaptation. You can just smell it on this thing.
While we had hopes for “Time Traveler’s Wife” (naive), Schwentke is no superstar, so the hot anticipation for this thing is just a lot of wishful thinking which geek sites are generally very good at. Also, this is the company behind “Twilight.” Just sayin’…