Red 2 – review

A second helping of the retirees' action thriller – the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel of shoot-em-ups, if you will. Bruce Willis once again leads the line, surrounded by a game, if not always entirely convincing, crew of (mostly) major-league thespians: John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins, Brian Cox. Willis is Frank Moses, jerked all-too-willingly out of domestic bliss with his former CIA phone contact (Mary Louise Parker); soon he finds himself on the trail of a nuclear weapon hidden somewhere in Moscow. Like the first one, it's played for laughs in-between bouts of mayhem; most of the gags are off-target, though Mirren's Nancy Mitfordesque assassin gets a pretty good kill ratio.