My family likes these movies so I've watched both RED and the sequel a couple time. They have enjoyable parts (largely anything to do with Helen Mirren's character, Victoria, and then Lee Byung Hun's in the second movie, and both movies have some nice Sarah/Victoria bits) but the romantic parts are so awful.
The romantic subplot of the second movie has Frank spending most of it trying to isolate Sarah from everything to "keep her safe," and Sarah being jealous over Frank's Exotic Foreign Ex (who, naturally, dies for the crime of having romantic interest in Frank when he's in love with someone else), and a gross subplot where the group plays a con that involves Frank "having' to hit Sarah in public, and the entire focus is on how incredibly hard it is for Frank to hit her and how everyone (including Sarah) has to emotionally support him over it. Because they couldn't have stage a public breakup that made her the sympathetic one without his slapping her in the face.
And you're right that that type of "meet cute" needing to die out already. CW's The Messengers has a pairing that I'd actually really like and find cute, except that their first meeting involves him getting into her car and pulling a gun on her and her daughter to get a ride to the town they were already going to. And he makes it clear in that first scene that he has no intentions of hurting any of them, but between that and their checking each other out in the store beforehand, I knew they were going to be paired romantically, and I hate that that kind of scene actually IS an intimator of as canon-supported pairing.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2015-06-17 12:44 pm (UTC)The romantic subplot of the second movie has Frank spending most of it trying to isolate Sarah from everything to "keep her safe," and Sarah being jealous over Frank's Exotic Foreign Ex (who, naturally, dies for the crime of having romantic interest in Frank when he's in love with someone else), and a gross subplot where the group plays a con that involves Frank "having' to hit Sarah in public, and the entire focus is on how incredibly hard it is for Frank to hit her and how everyone (including Sarah) has to emotionally support him over it. Because they couldn't have stage a public breakup that made her the sympathetic one without his slapping her in the face.
And you're right that that type of "meet cute" needing to die out already. CW's The Messengers has a pairing that I'd actually really like and find cute, except that their first meeting involves him getting into her car and pulling a gun on her and her daughter to get a ride to the town they were already going to. And he makes it clear in that first scene that he has no intentions of hurting any of them, but between that and their checking each other out in the store beforehand, I knew they were going to be paired romantically, and I hate that that kind of scene actually IS an intimator of as canon-supported pairing.