RED 2, review - Telegraph Stars: Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren, Anthony Hopkins The bar is low for RED 2 to be a little better than the weirdly successful action-comedy RED, and a little better it is. If you must see Helen Mirren in furs blasting away Russian security personnel, you get a lot of that. If you like John Malkovich as a maniacally paranoid former black ops spy hiding under sou'westers and faking his own death, you get him doing that, too. Dean Parisot, who made the delightful Galaxy Quest, has a funnier sensibility than the first movie's director, Robert Schwentke, but he's still defeated by a script that's over-complicated and under-sophisticated: elaborate throat-clearing for punchlines that never arrive. "Who would they keep on ice for 32 years?" asks Mirren about some mystery figure under lock and key - who else but Anthony Hopkins. He's a lovably dotty physics professor confined to a London psych-ward, until the gang break him out to retrieve a WMD of his own creation from Moscow. Infiltrating the Kremlin to avert apocalypse was done much more memorably in Mission: Impossible 4, which had suspense, great stunts, choice one-liners and clearly defined baddies. Until this film decides who its villain is - Catherine Zeta-Jones as a bitchy Russian spy called Katya? Neal McDonough's ruthless CIA agent? Maybe the screenwriters? - it's crashingly short on pace or urgency. Mirren taking a phone call while casually dissolving some corpses in the bath is a nice visual gag, but a typically random one: the movie's more content to spoof its concept than actually deliver it. "Retired & Extremely Dangerous" this lot may well be, but after two films proving they can't get it together, the emphasis really ought to be on retired.