Red, a fast-paced action/thriller starring Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and Helen Mirren, will make you forget your stereotypes of senior citizens – at least for a couple of hours. It’s a fun romp about CIA operatives who come out of retirement to stop an assassination.

The veteran stars seem to be having a ball playing members of a former black-ops group brought back together by a common purpose. Fortunately, the characters they play are still up to performing at the top of their game despite their ages. Frank Moses (Willis), the first one aware of trouble afoot, starts the ball rolling by contacting Joe Matheson (Freeman), then Marvin Boggs (Malkovich), and finally Victoria (Mirren). It doesn’t take long for this intrepid team to bond again. They all want to find out why they’ve become targets and hope to stop whatever dastardly plan has been put into play by an unknown source or sources.

Going along for the ride and adding a high level of comedy to these shenanigans is Sarah Ross (Mary-Louise Parker), who has been kidnapped by Frank in order to protect her.

Yes, some plot points caused me to roll my eyes, but the movie’s snarky sense of humor and exciting action scenes overshadow my negative feelings about that. Plus it’s such a treat to see the elegant Mirren in a sophisticated evening gown accessorized with combat boots as she gets ready for a shoot-out with the bad guys. And it’s almost as much fun watching Parker give her best performance yet in the role of Willis’ bewildered love interest. Her character arc is demanding, but she manages to convince us of Sarah’s rage as well as her growing admiration for her captor.

Willis endows Frank with a relatively calm demeanor in scenes showing everything around him coming apart. Malkovich is a riot as a man who takes paranoia to the max, Freeman puts us under his spell again with that magnificent voice, and Mirren looks like royalty gone rogue. They definitely fit their alert status of  “Retired – Extremely -- Dangerous.”

Standing out in the supporting cast are Karl Urban and Brian Cox. Urban displays a strong screen presence as an ambitious government agent assigned to stop the four retirees, and the versatile Brian Cox adopts a persuasive Russian accent while keeping viewers guessing about what his lovesick Cold War spy is up to. Rebecca Pidgeon, Julian McMahon and Richard Dreyfuss also deserve credit for making us want to boo the unsympathetic characters they portray.  

As action/thrillers go, Red ends up being one of the best so far this year.

Hooray for the old folks!

(Released by Summit Entertainment and rated “PG-13” for intense sequences of action violence and brief strong language.)

For more information about this film, go to the Internet Movie Data Base or Rotten Tomatoes website.