The Last Movie I Saw

A few days ago I wrote about the spate of fantasy-oriented films of late. A notable subset of that trend are all the comic book adaptations that keep popping up. Thirty plus years ago, I was a huge consumer of comics, and probably spent a fair amount of energy wishing that there were more movies being made from my favorites. But back in the days before CGI and other techniques had been perfected, superhero movies looked silly (except for the Christopher Reeves Superman series, but they depended more on character for their charm), and there weren't yet many non-superhero properties to exploit. Nowadays, just about every major character or series seems to be popping up on the big screen, including a couple that I would've flipped over back in my youth (like The Spirit and The Shadow), though my current perspective is that they generally aren't very good-- essentially the equivalent of the "throwaway" entertainment comics were supposed to be for most of their history. Red, directed by Robert Schwentke, is in that category. I enjoyed it while I was in the theater, and pretty much forgot about it soon after. The one thought that it elicited was that it was an awful lot like another comic adaptation I saw last year called The Losers; so much so that, as time goes by, I expect the two will run together in my head so that the only distinction I'll recall is that Red had some recognizable stars (Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Brian Cox, and especially John Malkovich) while I'm hard-pressed even now to name a single actor from The Losers. It strikes me as a bit odd that Hollywood has turned to the comics as a steady source of material, since the market for the comics themselves collapsed after the speculation boom of the 1980s. You certainly don't see spinner racks in drugstores and 7-11's anymore. They really just seem an excuse to replace thoughtful, human conflict with things that go bang. When I was thirteen, that was certainly enough to make me happy-- but are there really that many thirteen-year-olds buying movie tickets today to justify the ubiquity of these stories? I guess so, at least figuratively speaking (and no slight intended-- I'm obviously in that category at least some of the time).