What's the first thing the spy does after arriving in a new city? You and I haul our bags to the hotel and stand shifting our weight while a bored clerk pecks at a keyboard; the spy is led briskly to an all-white room where he's left alone with a safety deposit box. Inside the box: multiple passports, a wad of cash in different currencies, a gun with a silencer, an envelope with the name of a contact — everything he needs to navigate his new surroundings. If we see his hotel, it's luxurious. If we see him on a plane, he's either flying it himself or it's a private jet. We are repeatedly shown — more often, or at least more indelibly, than in the books some of these stories are based on — that the elements of travel we ourselves find exhausting and stressful have been magically made easy for the spy. The spy never worries about not understanding a language; whatever it is, he already speaks it, and fluently, with no trace of an accent. Instead of sitting around in train stations and dealing with subway platforms, something he'll do only if it's part of a chase, the spy procures a car (who knows how) or a helicopter, or a speedboat, or whatever vehicle he needs, which he always knows how to operate expertly, even if it's a Soviet tank. And you'd better believe he knows his way around at 100 miles an hour — he'll take shortcuts the locals haven't discovered yet. None of your panicked on-the-fly deciphering of Parisian road signs in your rented Renault Twingo.
When you and I pack for a trip, we're so preemptively defeated by the thought of weather and strange places that we take crushable hats and wicking layers and comfort-fit pants with legs that zip off at the knee. The spy, whether he's stylish like Bond or casual like Jason Bourne, never looks like he's traveling. But rain or shine, he always has just the right outfit. That may be why, whereas we stick to tourist areas and look in a guidebook to figure out where to have dinner, the spy can go anywhere he wants. He strolls into the classiest and most dangerous bars, the finest and grimiest restaurants, the ritziest and seediest casinos. He may pay for this freedom by being, say, attacked by komodo dragons. But doesn't that only guarantee that, unlike our own vacations, the spy's trip will never become tedious or disappointing, but will always see him living each moment to the fullest?
The link between the spy movie and tourism has been obvious since 1962, if not before — that was the year Bob Hope and Bing Crosby spoofed Dr. No in The Road to Hong Kong, the last entry in their long-running travel series. But I've never seen spy films that give away the game quite as happily as the Red franchise, the second of which opens Friday. The gimmick of Red, which is made even more explicit in Red 2, is that Bruce Willis, a retired CIA operative, just wants to live a normal life, while Mary-Louise Parker, his girlfriend, is a normal person who wants to be a spy. At the start of the second movie, they're in a Costco, and the joke is that Willis is bursting with enthusiasm for every average-joe implement of suburban routine, and Parker is bored and wants to go on another spy mission. He wants a backyard grill and some new bed linens; she just wants a vacation. And of course the movie gives her one, and because this is 2013 she doesn't even have to be chastised for it — never has to learn a bogus lesson about how home and safety are better than risk and excitement. She has none of the lethal repertoire of black-ops skills that the other characters possess; she misfires her gun, and when the team disguises her as a Russian security guard she can barely remember her one line. But she has a blast, because the movie is as much a travel fantasy for her as it is for the audience. The first film uses postcards as intertitles to establish scene changes. At one point in the second, when Willis is convalescing from a sedative a rival spy has dosed him with, she treats herself to a Parisian shopping spree on one of his mysterious rolls of cash. It's a pure prank, a movie built on the architecture of escapism while openly flourishing the blueprints. You think you want to be a character in a spy movie, it seems to be telling us. This is what it would look like if you really were.
by Brian Philips, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Digital Trends
