Book vs. Movie: Red
By Russ Bickerstaff
October 15, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Red
In 2003, British comic book writer Warren Ellis created a three-part miniseries for D.C.’s Homage Comics imprint entitled Red. The prolific mind behind the acclaimed Transmetropolitan had developed a clever little nugget of an idea that would have been unlikely to work in standard prose narrative format - a blood-soaked espionage actioner that was brought to the page by American comic book artist Cully Hammer. Six years later, the miniseries was collected in a graphic novel format for the first time. The idea for a Red film had been announced as early as June of 2008. Summit Entertainment has completed a release that makes it to theaters this month. The script for the film (written by Erich and Jon Hober, who previously adapted the comic book Whiteout for the big screen) is a considerable departure from the comic book. Whereas the comic book focuses on a single rogue ex-CIA agent on the run from a government that wants him eliminated, the film features a full cast of ex-C.I.A. agents played by some really talented actors including Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and Bruce Willis. How does the film's re-imagining of the premise compare with the tighter, more condensed vision of the comic book?
The Miniseries
Consisting of three monthly issues, Red was a very tight presentation when it debuted in September of 2003. The story begins in Langley, Virginia, as a new Director of the CIA is taken to the mysterious “Room R,” of the CIA complex. There he is shown a video detailing the work of a former agent named Paul Moses. So disgusted is the new director by what he’s seen that he orders Moses’s death. The story cuts to Moses - a man who lives life in complete solitude tormented by the memory of what he has done. His only social pleasure from life comes from his correspondence with his niece and frequent calls to a woman working behind a desk at C.I.A. headquarters who thinks his career with them had been much more innocuous than it was.
Moses’ life of solitude is shattered when a three-man C.I.A. hit squad in matching green hoodies arrive to try to take him down. Naturally, they don’t. All three are murdered by Moses. Now he is on a private vendetta against those who have ordered his death in Langley. Moses breaks makes his way from his D.C. home to Langley, brutally killing those who get in his way. Finally he confronts the Director who ordered his death and the deputy director who is acting as his advisor, mercilessly killing both of them. The story ends as security reaches the Director’s office. Ten firearms are pointed at Moses. He stands it point blank range raising a single pistol in his defense. “I’m the monster,” he says, “do your best.” The end.
Not exactly realistic, the story is a grizzly exaggeration of the darkness lurking in the C.I.A.’s history. If there’s a moral here, it’s that the history of the darker edges of the government should be allowed to die in peace. Judging from the relative lack of depth in the plot, however, it really feels like Ellis was going more for a mood piece than a morality tale here. The mood is delivered pretty competently in Cully Hamner’s artwork. Action is reasonably kinetic and has a good sense of action and pacing. The intensity seems respectably modulated throughout much of the series.
Hamner’s linework has a form and detail to it reminiscent of Geoff Darrow. There are parallels in theme and form between Red and the early ‘90’s Frank Miller/Geoff Darrow three-issue miniseries Hardboiled - an ultra-brutal sci-fi series that was altogether more polished, more inspired and released in a far more erratic schedule. Hamner’s work here lacks the explosive, ridiculously over-rendered beauty of Darrow’s. Hard Boiled looks considerably more inspired next to Hamner’s relatively flat execution in Red. We get a sense that Moses is, in fact, the best there is at what he does - a brutal killer who has lost all touch with his humanity and must shelter himself from other people or return to the brutality he had been trained for...but only a general sense of it.
The exaggerated stylish moodiness of Ellis’ script calls for a similarly stylish and exaggerated graphic rendering. Hamner only goes roughly halfway here. It’s exceedingly competent, but it needs to be far more inspired to give a visually dynamic depth to the relatively limited detail of Hamner’s story. The script doesn’t seem to go quite far enough to make this feel like anything other than a single-issue story stretched out into three issues and the artwork doesn’t stand on its own enough to make the length seem anything other than over-indulgent. The miniseries tells a pretty solid story, but without much else to offer, it’s largely forgettable.
The Movie
The film opens on roughly the ninth page of the comic book, skipping over much of the darkness. The intro with the new director of the CIA is absent, as is a tumultuous evening storm that introduces Moses - framing him in a dark, moody moment.
The film opens with Moses waking up in the morning. Moses is played here by Bruce Willis. As Moses, Willis seems to have a pleasant demeanor. Though he appears wide awake before a bedside alarm goes off and though we see him going through a pretty aggressive morning exercise routine including taking a few jabs at a basement punching bag, he doesn’t seem all that haunted.
A variation on four establishing pages in the first issue plays out over the course of the first eight or nine minutes of the film. Willis’s Moses comes across much younger. The telephone conversations with the girl at CIA headquarters are turned into something of an awkward romantic connection. In the comic book, the older Moses seems to have more of a paternal relationship with her. The paternal feel of the character makes his sudden trigger into a dark figure much more dramatic.
The comic book makes that transformation over the course of a brutally detailed action sequence that runs roughly from page 13 -21 of the first issue. The corresponding scene in the film takes-up roughly a minute and a half of screen time, looking fluid if not stylish as it does so. Rather than merely letting things coolly snap into place for Moses, the film decides that an efficient, three-man hit squad that can act covertly is not enough. This hit is handled by a group twice as big that would act without any care at all for the kind of commotion that would tend to cause in the nice, suburban neighborhood Moses lives in. It’s unrealistic and appallingly stupid. The film doesn’t execute the scene with any love of the overblown Hollywood action the script seems to be looking for.
The first issue is more or less covered in the first 11 minutes of the film without any respect for the darker end of the story. Thus, this portion of the movie comes as kind of a disjointed action sequence with a bit of awkward, interpersonal romantic drama as an introduction.
To be fair to the film, the action is competently paced in a format that feels very clean and kinetic. A faithful adaptation of the original story in this manner would only be onscreen for a little over a half an hour. Naturally, there’s going to be some desire to expand on things, as we discover when Moses confronts the girl at the office he’s been talking to. How the two different works handle the scene says a lot about the type of stories each end up becoming. In the comic book, Moses spills his guts about his past as a field agent with the CIA. He’s very businesslike, conducting himself in a very professional manner. In the film, the office girl comes home to find him already there. She’s alarmed, swinging a candlestick at him and generally being very hostile - rightfully so. There’s quite a bit of humor in the scene as it plays out between Bruce Willis and Mary-Louise Parker, but it’s not particularly dark. He lies to her to get her to leave the apartment, as people seem to be after Willis trying to kill him. The idiosyncratic, smooth, calculating killer who also tries his best to hold onto his sense of humanity is lost here. Moses in the film is more like a standard Bruce Willis action hero - fun to watch, but lacking in the kind of darkness that makes the character who he is.
When next we see Willis’s Moses, he’s driving. The office girl is in the back seat. There’s duct tape over her mouth. He’s evidently kidnapped her. This is more or less where the film completely veers off from the story it’s based on. It should be noted that this is only roughly 15 minutes into the film. We see a man talking on a phone conducting some sort of business over a phone conversation, presumably with a family member of his. He casually kills someone - framing it to look like suicide. We find out that his next hit is scheduled to be Moses - a former “analyst” for the CIA. Seeing that a vicious killer is after him, we clearly identify with the man on the run, even though he’s clearly just kidnapped a woman he seems to be lying to. Since this is a quirky Hollywood action film, it actually kind of works.
Moses and his captive are on the run. Before the first half hour of the film is out, he’s visiting an old friend of his - evidently an ex-CIA man who currently lives in a retirement home. (he’s played by Morgan Freeman.) The story that emerges is that Moses has been labeled “Retired - Extremely Dangerous” by the CIA. When the agent identified to assassinate him discovers that Moses was a field agent and NOT an analyst, things get vaguely interesting, but any of the deeper aspirations of the original story don’t seem to have made the transfer to the screen. This is a solid, well-executed espionage thriller, but it lacks any depth or inspiration. Some rather talented actors play retired CIA agents - Helen Mirren, John Malkovich and the aforementioned Morgan Freeman - but the film isn’t much beyond their efforts.
From camerawork to lighting to every other aspect of the look of the film, Red ends up feeling like a made for TV thriller - something of a pleasant cross between an early episode of Moonlighting and something from the first two seasons of Alias. It’s not an altogether unpleasant treatment of the concept, but it lacks in any real depth.
The Verdict
The original comic book lacked the kind of stylish finesse that would have leant any decent impact to the darkness of the script, but it had enough depth to make it worth the effort. The film departs from the darkness of the comic book considerably, preferring a far more polished Hollywood action film. The usual sort of humor that goes along with the standard contemporary action film makes the Red enjoyable, but aside from some rather interesting performances by some talented older actors, the film lacks any real inspiration.
Neither the film nor the comic book are particularly memorable, but the original inspiration behind the comic book seems to have come from a desire to take a glance at the darkness behind US foreign policy - not a bad idea as things progress into the next century. By contrast, the film is a silly Hollywood action film with no aspirations beyond simple entertainment. It's fun, but largely inconsequential.