For Red, Willis gets funny, Mirren gets her gun

Share

Bruce Willis has seen more than his share of actors blasting one weapon or another in his long career as an action star. But the sight of his Red co-star Helen Mirren gleefully firing round after round from handguns and assault rifles was something of a revelation.

"She makes shooting guns look so much better than anybody I've ever seen," Willis said during a recent visit to Toronto to promote the film, which opened Friday.

Based on writer Warren Ellis and artist Cully Hamner's three-issue comic book miniseries of the same name, Red tells the story of a retired CIA black-ops agent who must put together his old team to uncover who is behind a plot to kill him.

While the movie boasts plenty of action, it is the cast of heavyweights - including not only Willis and Mirren but Morgan Freeman, Richard Dreyfuss and John Malkovich - that will likely be the biggest draw for audiences. Most of those actors didn't sign up for the film, which Willis has been working to get made for years, until just a few months before shooting began.

"It was a great surprise, and the scale of the film became obviously much larger," Willis says.

Jumping from one U.S. city to another, the film, largely shot in Toronto, also does its best to leap from genre to genre. Its mix of humour, action and romance is what attracted him to the story, Willis says.

"It was a pretty ambitious script. You could have just made the film about the romantic comedy aspect of it. You could have just made it an action movie. You could have just made it a buddy film," he says. "But they tried to put all those things in it."

At a mere 66 pages, much had to be added to the story in order to adapt the comic into a feature-length film, Willis says. Part of that fleshing out process included adding more humour to the comic's serious, darker tone.

While Willis has acted in all of the genres blended here, Red presented him with a rare opportunity to work with an ensemble cast.

"I've never really worked in a cast with that many actors who were in a couple of big scenes together," he says. And while Willis is the action-movie veteran of the group, he didn't need to share advice on how to handle explosions or take down bad guys with his cast mates.

"It just wouldn't have seemed appropriate to offer anybody any tips in that club. They're pro, veteran actors," he says.

And with few exceptions, such as Mary-Louise Parker, who plays Willis's love interest, and Karl Urban, who plays a CIA agent out to bring down Willis, most of the cast are well into their later years. The film happily plays up the idea of a group of retirees - the title is an acronym for "Retired: Extremely Dangerous" - out to kick some butt.

"There is a retirement motif in the film," Willis says.

At 55, Willis may be getting on in years, but doesn't mind his character being called "grandpa," as he is in several scenes, including one rollicking fight scene with Urban. "You can't take yourself seriously," he says.

That could very well be the motto for Red, which revels in a type of cartoon violence that is just this side of a Wile E. Coyote episode. Scenes such as the one in which Malkovich shoots a bullet that hits a rocket-propelled grenade right on the nose in close-up, or Morgan Freeman beating Richard Dreyfuss into submission, are clearly meant for comic relief.

Willis has also been showing his comedic side in his role as spokesman for Sobieski, a Polish vodka. In one commercial for the brand he says, "No, I'm not just an action hero with rugged good looks and some singing ambitions." In another, he pokes fun at himself by asking, "What the heck does Bruce Willis know about making vodka? Nothing."

But getting a laugh, whether in those commercials or in a movie, isn't easy, Willis says. In fact, it's much more difficult than having to punch out bad guys or do stunt scenes.

"It's the hardest part. Anybody could flop on the floor. If you have not enough sense in your head, you can jump off anything high and land on the floor and go, 'Yeah, how was that?' But trying to be funny is difficult."