'Red,' white and dull all over

There are few industries with business competitions as exciting as the one in the comics world between DC and Marvel.

This friendly war is almost always good for the consumer, as the two media giants slash prices, attract top talent and churn out an ever-flowing stream of quality material all in the name of beating the other guy.

In the last decade, running a comic book empire has become as much about the extras as it has about actual comics. The explosion of the comic book movie has had a lot to do with this, and it’s one area where Marvel has annihilated DC both in overall quantity and average quality.

But in the last two years or so, DC has started to bounce back, releasing a slate of movies highlighted by “The Dark Knight,” “Kick-Ass” and now, “Red.”

Unfortunately, in an effort to be as broadly appealing as possible, “Red”  may find itself without an audience. While it is indeed based on Warren Ellis’ and Cully Hammer’s 2003-04 miniseries of the same name, it dropped most of that book’s violence and foul language to secure a PG-13 rating. Since most of the book’s appeal comes from its ultra-violence, the watered-down film version packs little of its source material’s punch.

The movie’s greatest strength is its cast. Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Mary-Louise Parker, Karl Urban and a 93-year-old Ernest Borgnine are all sublimely funny and somehow wholly in their element, even when firing machine guns and jumping out of moving vehicles. The cast is another way that appealing to an unnecessarily wide audience worked to the movie’s advantage; this reviewer heard more than one elderly gasp of delight in the theater at Borgnine’s first appearance onscreen.

While “Kick-Ass” will go down as DC’s greatest contribution to movies in 2010, “Red” provides a cleaned-up, if not always interesting, counterpoint.