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Red 2 | 2013 | PG-13 | - 3.6.4

A former Black Ops CIA agent (Bruce Willis) calls his old squad (John Malkovich, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Lee Byung-hun, Brian Cox and Helen Mirren) back together for a mission to Paris, London and Moscow. Looking for a missing state-of-the-art nuclear device, they confront highly experienced international assassins, terrorists and government officials who have their own agendas. Also with Mary-Louise Parker, Anthony Hopkins and David Thewlis. Directed by Dean Parisot. English subtitles are provided for scenes filmed in Russian, Korean and Farsi. [1:56]

SEX/NUDITY 3 - A Penthouse Magazine cover shows a woman from the waist up wearing a bikini that reveals significant cleavage (the magazine is not opened). In a South American tavern, four women dance wearing midriff-revealing blouses that are off one shoulder; a man at the bar wears a Carmen Miranda fruit hat, necklaces, lipstick and a woman's feather jacket. A man undergoes an X-ray scan and we see his bare body, front and back, from the head to the hips including navel. Several women wear either blouses or long gowns with deep V-neck bodices that reveal cleavage. A woman's V-neck top extends to her abdomen, with a little bosom shown. A man in a plane wears a sleeveless undershirt that bares shoulders and arms. A woman wears a short kimono that reveals bare thighs and legs.
 Several scenes feature short but passionate kisses between a man and a woman.
 A woman criticizes her boyfriend for another woman kissing him and says, "She was cleaning your teeth with her tongue" and the man smiles. A CIA boss tells a male prisoner, "I love watching your girlfriend shave her legs in the tub" (on surveillance). Two men lie close together in spoon fashion on a sidewalk, avoiding gunfire; one man asks the other, "Is that a stick of dynamite?" (he really does have dynamite). A man smells a woman's shoe, saying that he likes the way her toes curl when she fires a cannon. A man and a woman plan to spend a night under the stars together in the future (sex implied).

VIOLENCE/GORE 6 - Two men lie on a floor, unconscious; a woman steps on the throat of one of them, making him gag; the camera cuts to the door of the bathroom, where another man's legs hang over the end of a tub and while talking to a friend on the phone, she pours in two bottles of acid that smoke as the legs convulse, she pushes them into the tub and she adds another bottle of acid to end the scene.
 A man makes an origami figure with a sharp point and kills another man by jamming the point quickly up the nose or under the chin; the second man falls forward onto his face from a kneeling position (no blood is shown).
 A man slaps a woman in the face at a bar, another man comforts her and she kidnaps him at gunpoint; in the man's office, another man enters and knocks the woman onto a couch with a heavy slap, she shoots and kills him and we see a little blood, and then opens a safe by using smoking acid; at the entrance to the building, a man disguised as an elderly man with a walker asks for asylum and a woman knocks out a guard; the "elderly" man blows up three toilets and three sinks in a washroom and we see gushing feces and water; in another room, a scientist stabs two male agents, killing them both.
 A CIA boss enters a government building and with a silenced gun, kills the receptionist and her supervisor (we see no blood) with dozens of killings without blood to follow; the CIA boss and increasing numbers of military men fire automatic rifles at civilians, dropping bodies to the floor; a gunman shoots a metal door off a room, kills an interviewer and tells a political prisoner that he will kill the man's girlfriend after torturing her (filleting her from head to toe); the gunmen chase a man into a records room, firing weapons and creating hundreds of large holes in walls without hitting their quarry and he dispatches all of the shooters by using a variety of weapons (e.g. a metal box and a piece of a table for striking, a rifle gun-strap for hanging); a man breaks through a wall and helps the prisoner escape by shooting several military men (no blood) and he holds a machete but does not use it; the two men escape and a soldier looks under a fallen friend to see a grenade that explodes and fills the room with fire and smoke. Two men and a woman chained to wooden posts wear canvas hoods; the hoods are pulled off to show them a firing squad as another woman uses automatic cannon-fire on a hill to shoot the firing squad (no blood is shown) and frees the captives by shooting their chains. A scientist pulls a gun on several people, shooting a woman who falls, convulses slightly and dies while a man crosses himself; a CIA boss enters and cuffs the scientist, taking him away to soldiers and a plane; on the plane, the scientist uses an antidote in a hypo on himself and releases nerve gas before randomly shooting convulsing soldiers and CIA members on the plane; he stabs and kills a final CIA agent once they land (we see no blood).
 An SUV explodes and flips into the air, landing with a loud bang and in flames; the camera cuts to a funeral with mourners wearing black, where a friend gives a man in an open casket a short, tearful eulogy after first poking the corpse in the back of the hand with a corsage pin twice to ensure that he is dead and a woman gasps at this. A Jeep containing two men and a woman approaches a bridge and stops and a woman soldier stands at the other end with a rifle in hand; she points it at the Jeep and the camera cuts to a scene of the Jeep on the embankment of a river, burning while she shoots into it (the people in it are safe). A van door opens on a street where two men walk and a man in the van fires a cannon at the men, not hitting them but cutting other vehicles in half; the two men lie on the street and we hear that dynamite will be thrown into the van, and we see the van explode with a lot of smoke and flames. Two men break into the Kremlin after bribing a guard with a pizza, they break a hole in a brick wall, place a quiet plastic-explosive that creates a bit of dust, and then enter a control room; they steal a nuclear device, escape, and blow up the entrance they created with a loud grenade activation. As a man and a woman walk outside a diner, the trash barrel explodes into flames and smoke.
 Helicopters and cars chase another car containing a man and a woman; dozens of handguns and rifles are fired, the woman points handguns out the two front windows as the car drifts sideways and she shoots several drivers dead (she has a dot of blood spatter on her forehead); cars drive off the road and crash loudly and two semi-trucks roll over, explode and miss hitting the car when the car's driver is able to drive under the midsection of one truck; an SUV behind the car flips high into the air, catches fire and lands off-screen.
 Inside a helicopter, a man tries to disarm a nuclear bomb as other people yell; the vehicle crashes in smoke and sparks, skidding on grass and the pilot dies from a gunshot to the chest (no blood) while two other men hang upside down in their seat belts but escape unhurt; one of the men carries a nuclear device onto a private plane and gains the release of a woman held by an elderly man; the plane takes off and explodes (presumably all the people on board die).
 A man catches a thrown knife between his palms just as it approaches a woman's face in a café and a foot chase begins, changing to two cars and a motor bike, whose occupants shoot at one another; one car is hit by six other cars (no one is hurt), that car gets stuck between buildings in a narrow alley, while the another car intercepts the motorbike at the other end, knocking the rider off the bike (the biker's face is very bloody, with open cuts from this and a previous fall) and the camera cuts to a hotel room where a special agent slaps the biker's face several times, a woman puts a knife to his throat and he shouts loudly in anger "For God's sake!"
 Police cruisers rush along a street in a background scene with their lights flashing and sirens sounding; the camera cuts to a car containing two men and a woman and the woman looks at a glass jar filled with tarantulas; we hear moaning from the trunk and hear that an Army officer has been held captive for three days, dosed with LSD while surrounded by rats and the tarantulas; we see the car stopped at the side of the road and the trunk opened as one of the captors alternately slaps and hugs the other man three times, shows him tarantulas to scare him, and then listens to information about a bomb.
 A man fistfights with a gunman using kicking and punching in a warehouse room; many shelving units fall over with a crash and they both end up with bloody faces, but agree to work together against a mad scientist. A woman fistfights with her supervisor knocking him down and escaping from an interrogation room. A woman pretends to be a psych patient wearing a costume and straightjacket in a sanitarium and screaming that she is the Queen of England; she kicks a doctor out of the frame and jams a hypodermic into the chest of a male nurse, drawing a stream of blood; her colleagues appear dressed as medical staff and we see the real staff bound and gagged with duct tape while in an isolation cell, and we see an elderly scientist babbling over walls full of math equations; he tricks a man and a woman into the center of the cell and exits through the door, locking it behind him; they shoot their way out, but armed SWAT members capture them. In a convenience store, a man is accosted by a dozen police officers, but he fights them all off with spinning kicks and punches; he finds himself handcuffed to a cooler door, he yanks the door free and uses it as a shield and a striking weapon until the glass shatters and the door frame breaks, but the man uses pieces of the frame as short-staff weapons and pounds another dozen shooting police officers unconscious before escaping. A man collapses on a tabletop, apparently from a substance put into his wine, though we don't see him drink it; the camera cuts to a hotel room, where a woman slaps him in the face a dozen times to rouse him and they argue briefly. At a Paris bank, soldiers arrest a woman, who tries to kick two of the soldiers unsuccessfully; inside the bank vault where they found her, we see a severed hand in a plastic bag, without blood.
 A woman handling a handgun for the first time, accidentally shoots past a friend and alarms him. A man consults an iPad to view surveillance as another man on the other end jams a rifle butt into the camera lens.
 We hear a villain called The da Vinci of Death for inventing a nuclear device, nerve gases and other WMD; he is said to have killed over 1600 people by poisoning a water supply with Amazonian frog venom and another 11 million people will die if he is not stopped. A man says that a criminal was a good shot and paranoid. In a meeting with Russians, an American woman asks a colleague, "Can't we just kill her?" A woman extracts information from a man being interrogated and she tells another woman to "suck it." A man says that a certain agent's needs are "killing, eating, sexting, killing, eating and killing."
 A gunman promises to kill another man in the future, but never does. A man pulls a handgun on his friend, but then puts it away. Two men argue, one shouting loudly; the shouting man demands $30 million for a stolen plane and $2 million for not killing the other man, and then he walks away. A woman dancing on a platform fires a rifle into the air while laughing.
 Animated figures of men from a comic book shoot and move in slow motion in a dim setting, while empty shells and bullets spew from handguns. A hotel room bed is covered with automatic rifles. A man gives a woman a custom pearl-handled gun.
 A man eats two 30-year-old Moon Pies as a female friend grimaces. Several scenes feature one or two men smashing food into their mouths and talking with mouths full. What might be a peeled banana or large bird-dropping falls onto the fruit-decorated hat of a man at an indoor bar.

LANGUAGE 4 - 1 not fully enunciated F-word, 4 scatological terms, 1 anatomical term, 7 mild obscenities, exclamations (shut-up, For the love of Mike!), name-calling (crazy, stupid, bozo, skanky, slutty, pariah), stereotypical references to the French, Russians, Iranians, men, women, CIA, mad scientists, mental illness, 6 religious exclamations (e.g. For God's sake, Thank God, Oh my God, My God, Oh God).

SUBSTANCE USE - A man says that another man used LSD for over a decade, a man admits to giving an Army officer three hits of LSD to make him reveal secret information, a man says that a certain woman is affected by a particular male friend as if he is Kryptonite (immobilizes her like a drug), and a Russian offers Americans suicide pills from a medication bottle (they decline). Several café and restaurant scenes feature tables where people drink glasses of wine, several scenes on a private plane feature men or women drinking wine or champagne, a dozen people toast with vodka, a CIA boss drinks wine calmly between beatings that he inflicts on a prone and unconscious man, a man performs a tasting on an expensive wine in a restaurant while two Iranian men become impatient and angry with him and his slurping, a spy lures a wine taster and bidder to a hotel over an iPad by offering an extremely rare wine for sale, a posh restaurant has a floor-to-ceiling back-bar filled with expensive bottles of wine and liquor, and two men drink fruit drinks at a bar where we can see bottles of liquor and beer. A man finds a tobacco pipe in a vault (he does not smoke).

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Nuclear weapons, war, international relations, crime, justice, drug and alcohol use, mental illness, relationships, friendship, duty, government service, aging.

MESSAGE - The skills required to protect the world from evil are ageless.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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