Christmas, merrily delivered by Amazon

For a single sequence in the middle of The red onea new Christmas-themed caper that is simultaneously aimed at all audiences and none at all, the film bursts into life as if emerging from a drugged haze. Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), a long-time security guard for none other than Santa (JK Simmons) is on the trail of his kidnapped boss and has recruited the cynical, ill-behaved “naughty schemer” Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) to help him. Their shoulder-patting “try asking this guy, I guess” has led them to the hidden land of Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), a fearsome creature with ties to Santa Claus. Suddenly, the film is awash in complicated practical effects makeup jobs, with enough Christmas animals to fill, well, maybe not the famous cantina on Tatooine, but maybe a more modest pub in a similar neighborhood. Jack, trying to cheat his way out of danger, gets Callum involved in a competitive punching game. The slapstick is fun and takes advantage of Johnson’s ability to take a punch. The effects look nice, as if they were designed out of pure love for the form. There’s a bit of palpable atmosphere – some real movie magic, even without pushing the audience to open their eyes in wonder.

Before and after this sequence, The red one is a stroke. Perhaps it was included as a way for director Jake Kasdan to issue a sideways, half-assed apology: Look, all of you Zero effect fans, those kinds of movies are clearly dead and buried, but something as passably entertaining as them Jumanji movies are not off the table. More frighteningly, it seems possible that the filmmakers convinced themselves that the rest of the film was more or less on the same level of good fun, perhaps because it isn’t actively hateful.

The red one is, however, a distinctly joyless execution of a premise that’s supposed to be overflowing with imagination, the better to eventually overwhelm degenerate tracker Jack, who naturally has a fractured relationship with his young son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel) that needs mending. But the film’s invention is largely in the service of rebranding the North Pole as a cool, spy-like (or at least Spy Kids-like) operation that uses both enchantments and a staff of thousands to deliver gifts each year; it’s a bit like asking children and adults alike to rediscover the true meaning of Christmas by thinking about how wonderful it would be if The red one parent company Amazon had access to ancient magic.

The aggressively secular and gift-based systems of The red one is almost enough to induce a damp holiday wish for more piously churchy seasonal entertainment. To its credit, the film is very much about reconciling some of the oddities of various Santa folklore – particularly the concept of keeping track of who’s been good or bad, whatever that means – with the candor more broadly associated with Christmas. However, it’s hard to fully appreciate this when the mythological con is more purely connected to how even the film’s whimsy seems focussed and endlessly recalculated.

One of the film’s magico-technological gimmicks is a cape that allows Callum to change the size of objects (turning toy cars into real cars, etc.), and during fight scenes he uses it on himself to disorient his opponents. The sight of a pint-sized rock zipping around makes it seem like the gag at one point might have been that a physically imposing once-and-future wrestler is actually playing an elf. Maybe they realized that Elf got there 20 years earlier (minus the man-of-action angle) – or maybe “use computers to make a smaller cliffhanger” was really the only inspiration behind these moments. There certainly isn’t much to his character as written; Casting Johnson as a true believer only feels right if you allow a hint of mania behind his confidence. Callum is just another sad brand for the actor to synergize with.

As for Johnson’s full-sized co-star: Is Chris Evans done with one Christmas carol scenario, with the tragedies and nightmares of the streaming company as The gray man, Ghostedand now The red one stands for spirits? Amazingly, The red one may be the best of his recent covert-ops trilogy simply by virtue of not trying too hard to generate endless sarcastic zingers.

Instead, the film’s budding tween-friendly coolness rests on its Marvel-style production and costume design, which is to say, it’s filled with colors that are muted and muted for no other reason than to make a nonsensically “grounded” version of a futuristic north pole cityscape. The combination of this expensive fog and a current events cycle spotlighting serial impunity helps make a case for the film’s fantastic winter witch villain Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), who wants an even more punitive system with Christmas doom on space – and looks fabulous in her fierce advocacy. Alas, all who made The red one got off easy.

Director: Jake Kasdan
Authors: Chris Morgan
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, Kiernan Shipka, JK Simmons, Wesley Kimmel
Release date: 15 November 2024