Someone in Wardrobe had fun with goofy outfits: Mary-Louise Parker, Bruce Willis, John Malkovich in Red 2

Good actors, bad lines, and lots of explosions

Red 2 is a second-rate summer blockbuster with a small A-List cast. It rides the coattails of the original Red rather than builds on it. There is a change of personnel, and not at all for the worse, but somehow that don't much help. It should be great to have John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, and Anthony Hopkins on board. Even the Korean martial artist Byung-hun Lee, whose chiseled face initially suggests Alain Delon, adds some dash

Oh yes: and I forgot, Catherine Zeta-Jones, as a Russian spy who has no Russian accent. There is also David Thewlis ("to his everlasting shame," as Kyle Smith of The Post says) as a character called "The Frog," a bad guy wine expert in Paris who is not French. It's overkill. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't quite put Red back together again.

The trouble is that the material they are given has all the flaws of Hollywood action movies. Too much going on, with very little point to it. Too many explosions and shoot-em-ups, with the use of automatic weapons so powerful they can rip a wall or a vehicle to shreds, without necessarily killing anyone at times. A terrible waste. And worst of all, with such good line readers on hand, a shocking lack of good dialogue. Production values are high. Images are sharp and clear (if not particularly distinctive). It's a movie that's all dressed up with nowhere very interesting to go.

Let's not assume that great actors perform well no matter who directs them. They need a guiding hand. And perhaps the German-born Robert Schwentke, though he had only mediocre films under his belt, was better at celebrity-wrangling than his replacement here, the more experienced but mostly-TV director Dean Parisot. Still, the finger must be pointed at John and Erich Hoember, who wrote both this and its predecessor. They either ran dry this time, or last time we weren't paying that much attention. Some schticks really aren't worth repeating. But alas, Hollywood does not know that. It's run more and more strictly for the bottom line. The standard set was never that high, but it has not been met.

R.E.D. (Retired, Extremely Dangerous) Frank Boston (Willis) and his girlfriend (Parker) get pulled back in action by his oddball ex-cohort Marvin (Malkovich) to track down some bad guys who may be onto a very bad weapon (designed by a nutty scientist long on ice in England, a Dr Bailey -- Hopkins). They themselves are accused on a website of planting it somewhere in Moscow in 1979. They have to find out what's become of it. And they meet up along the way with The Frog and Katja (Zeta-Jones) , with the well-dressed assassin Han Cho Bai (Lee) out to kill Frank. And with Bailey. This is just an excuse for some dangerous globe-trotting. The plot doesn't matter, of course.

The trouble is, the lines do matter, and so do cool moments. There are not enough of either. There are rapid changes of venue, with Paris, Moscow, and London announced with title pages so vivid -- they're drenched in red -- a colorblind mentally deficient person would not miss them. It is true, Zeta-Jones glows, Mirren is elegant and wittily evil -- the latter dissolving corpses in acid while talking on the telephone and shooting a giant automatic weapon while lounging on a picnic blanket; Parker as always comes up with many sly little expressions. Malkovich's weird outfits are more entertaining than his line readings. His goofiness doesn't quite come off this time. It needs a touch more evil (at which Malk can be so very good), and his timing doesn't seem to mesh well with Willis'. My favorite is Hopkins, who delivers a polite, old fashioned Britishness with lots of "jolly goods" and "old chaps" encapusulating his role's vicious genius ideas and delivered with a well-oiled motor mouth smoothness that provides the suavity this movie, with its typical-for-Hollywood excess of explosions and rains of bullets, is in dire need of.

But that is the recurrent problem. There can never be enough suavity -- even Mirren's panache and dashing outfits don't suffice -- when the body count and fire power outweigh the dramatic interest and dialogue. That is why Neanderthals like Stallone and Swarzenegger work well in cheap blockbusters: you need not a cool line reading but an emphatic one and a deep voice that can be heard over the bombs and rat-a-tat-tats.

Red 2 came out in the US July 19, 2013. It will be released all over everywhere in July, August, and September. Metacritic rating: 47.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.