Metacritic reviews

Even the more cartoonish performances, like John Malkovich's acid-damaged paranoiac, fit the movie's vision of the vanished, wild-and-woolly heyday of spycraft.

Red isn't a great movie, but it's great fun, and if that sounds like damning with faint praise, you take things too seriously.

It's a lot of fun and, because of the high quality of the cast, there's no need to feel guilty about praising such an inherently silly motion picture.

The result is like a sugar rush after a visit to the vintage candy store.

Only a curmudgeon could entirely resist the laid-back charms of Red, an amusing, light-footed caper about a team of aging CIA veterans rudely forced out of retirement.

Not the best. Not the worst. Just the classiest.

It's an amusing geriatric uprising that might just as well be titled "Gray."

Red has enough acting flourishes and incidental action pleasures to make it an adrenalin-jacked giggle, if not exactly the romp one so fervently expects.

It's the casting, stupid!

No one is expected to take any of this seriously, so Schwentke keeps things light: light on big laughs, light on unique action set pieces and light on any sense that these game but retired spies are too old for this crap.