Monday, January 20, 2014

If I Made It: R.E.D. 3

The Concept:  I decided to pop in R.E.D. 2 today and watch that.  In watching it I had some thoughts for a sequel.  Since Bruce Willis clearly doesn't want to action anymore, pretty much any interview in the last five years would tell you that so with that in mind it would probably be a good idea to free Bruce Willis from the franchise and conclude the trilogy on some growth.  So our plot catalyst will be the death of Frank Moses and who is our replacement?  Well we've been building her up for the last two movies, Mary-Louise Parker as Sarah Ross.  Here's my three act breakdown of R.E.D. 3:


Overview:

-Act 1:

  We open with Sarah Ross leaving the house in a hurry, she kisses Frank Moses and tells him that she's late.  When he asks her what she has planned she stammers and then says "You know... girl time with Victoria." he tells her to be careful and we smash cut to her shooting at a target.  She blows up a watermelon perched on a crude human target and celebrates with Victoria.  Victoria then gives us the plot dump about how she and Marvin have been training Sarah and how Sara should tell Frank, and Frank won't be happy, blah, blah, blah.

  Cut to Frank doing housework, cut back to Marvin training Sarah how to use camouflage and deception, cut to Frank cutting an orange, cut to Sarah practicing knife fighting with Victoria.  Etc, etc, cut to Frank doing something normal and cut to Sarah doing something similar but in a military context.

  Frank get's taken out by someone more R.E.D. than him.  It's a pretty brutal fight but the unknown figure gets the best of him by pushing his head up into a window and Frank gets sniped.

  Sarah decides to get revenge, Victoria and Marvin try to convince her otherwise but when she proves unstoppable they decide to help.  They try to tell her that training was fun and all but this will be real and they don't know if she can handle it but she is determined.

-Act 2:

  The only lead they have is the fact that whoever took Frank out probably had a history with Frank so now begins the excavation of Frank's dark past.  At one point, while trying to uncover a hidden cache of information that Frank had they get into a fire fight with the mysterious group behind killing Frank and end up capturing one of the bad guys.  During Sarah's interrogation of the suspect she's told point blank that "Frank wasn't the great guy you thought he was, he was a monster."

  Every piece of dark information they find about the things Frank did get contextualized by Marvin and Victoria to depict a person who was, in fact, a monster but trapped by circumstances and was trying to turn his life around via his relationship with Sarah.  He saw Sarah as his last chance at normality.

  Meanwhile Sarah starts to feel her own humanity slip as she starts to push the limits of her morality.  At first she finds it hard to shoot at people but that becomes easier, then during her interrogation her anger pushes her to her moral limit in what she can do to another person.  There's a lot mirror staring and hand staring and crying.  She confides in Victoria and Victoria admits to be so far gone herself that she can offer no advice but she doesn't know any other way so she marches on.

-Act 3:

  Sarah struggles to figure out what she's going to do when she finds out who's behind killing Frank.  Big bad gets found out and taken down (the big bad and the group of bad guys are all people that have been affected by Frank's actions, they are bad people who had bad things done to them by Frank).  There is much shooting and a car chase and fighting, man you should have seen it all, it was insane.  She finally has the bad guy in her gun sights and she tears up and forgives Big Bad, deciding that all of this is pointless.  The big bad presses their advantage.  They kill Victoria who was embracing Sarah and trying to comfort her.  Sarah, wounded, goes into a rage, fights the big bad one more time, barely pulls out a victory and this time shoots them dead without hesitating.

  Marvin, who was off dealing with something else, or recovering from a car crash walks up to Sarah.  He stares at Victoria's dead body for a bit, does his Marvin thing, shrugs and puts his arm around Sarah.  As they're walking out Marvin mentions a job in Modolva that they should consider.  Smash cut to credits.

No comments:

Post a Comment