“RED” is a good time. A bloody good time. There’s tons of shooting and violence, but come to think of it, there’s not much blood, only a sizeable body count. This is tongue-incheek violence — not even earnest violence- as-entertainment, but violence as comedy. RED means “Retired and Extremely Dangerous.” Bruce Willis (Frank Moses) is RED, the best CIA agent that ever was. He and his cronies (Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren and king-of-quirk John Malkovich) come out of retirement because something fishy is going on involving a hit list, a 1981 cover-up in Guatemala and the vice president of the United States. Oh yes, and Frank takes along Mary-Louise Parker (Sarah), a mousy government phone operator who reads spy-romance novels, whom he is crushing on. If you don’t like violence (ridiculous or not), you won’t like “RED,” and you especially won’t like seeing Mirren firing round after round after round of machine gun volleys in her white evening gown. Because this movie is from DC Comics, the tenor of the violence is not supposed to faze us the same way more realistic violence would. But, of course, everyone has their own sensibilities, and to some, violence is violence. Beneath the jocularity is a serious message about what our CIA really does and is capable of. As in movies like “Syriana,” there’s a division between good guys and bad guys in the government system. In RED the real bad guys are the arms dealers, the private sector, the defense contractors. There’s a repeating Hollywood message here about how America can still be “good”: if individuals, even within corrupt systems, do the right thing, and of course, put love and family first, and sacrifice all when required. Perhaps this is a much more sober movie than it originally appears to be. We’re not supposed to laugh at any of the true tragedies (like a massacre in Guatemala), but we are supposed to laugh at everything else. This could have been a one-joke movie: elderly CIA operatives back in action. But it’s not. Not even with 93-year-old Ernest Borgnine in charge of a CIA archives so secret it doesn’t exist. In the end, “RED” is a good, old-fashioned spy-caper-comedy. People of a certain age will enjoy it more than others, being more familiar with Cold War and Vietnam War-era tropes, as well as the aging actors.