After so much hype that surrounded it's promising premise, it's star studded cast and surprisingly enticing trailer - Summit Entertainment's October action offering
Red turned into one of the biggest disappointments of the year - a thoroughly laborious letdown with a confused & inconsistent tone and a lack of coherent storytelling. It was dumb & loud, dumb & loud and yes... dumb & loud, trying to work both as a serious C.I.A. thriller and a light-hearted action satire - drastically failing at both. But not unlike the other dumb & loud action movie of 2010, The Expendables
, - the O.A.P. action thriller caught on at the box office with a healthy $90 million take and an impressive $164 million worldwide return on a budget of $58 million. It also happened to be nominated for the Golden Globes under the Best Picture Musical or Comedy category, which certainly helped raise the film's profile among execs. So it makes sense today that
Collider report Summit Entertainment are keen on a sequel to their biggest film outside of the Twilight franchise and have hired the first movie's scribes
Jon and
Eric Heober to come up with the story.
Red is of course based on a Warren Ellis and Cully Hammer comic book but as the Hoebers deviated quite a lot from the source material there's little pre-written stipulations of where a second film needs to go, so that is probably immensely freeing for the writers and
perhaps they can come up with something worthwhile for another roll of the dice. Personally, we think they need to fine a tone for the sequel and stick with it. I was quite fond of Red for the first 20 mins of so (we were into Bruce Willis acting all Carl Fredrickson and the blossoming romance with Mary Louise Parker) but it soon turned into an oddly elaborate C.I.A. thriller that never could find it's focus. John Nugent
reviewed the film for OWF last year and gave it a lowly two stars. Willis, Helen Mirren and co. including director Robert Schwentke all looked like they had a good time on the movie though so we think Summit Entertainment could probably attract them all to return... and possibly add the likes of Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta and Harvey Keitel into the mix... but first things first, the Hoebers need to deliver a script Summit are keen on before they win their greenlight.