Dwayne Johnson drops a lump of coal

On November 15, 2024By Littum

The heroes of Red One, a sparkling lump of Christmas action-comedy coal coming to a multiplex near you, travel the world via secret portals hidden in the back of toy stores. As any child in the audience might ask, “Wait, are there stores that only sell toys?” Well, not anymore, Timmy. Such brick-and-mortar establishments have been largely wiped out by Amazon, aka the mega-corporation that financed this movie. Watching the company build the story of an upcoming blockbuster around a business model it destroyed is about as cruel as, say, Netflix making one sitcom about Blockbuster.

Speaking of the streaming giant, Red One isn’t a sequel to Red Notice, though it shares a star and a general air of gross commercial indifference with the algorithmic slop. There’s something distinctly Bezosian about its vision of the most wonderful time of the year: Santa, played by an inscrutably overqualified JK Simmons, is a dashing mogul who meets the gym before climbing onto the sleigh and running his operation with an efficiency, that could put a twinkle in any billionaire’s eye. Early on, the film lands at the North Pole, and the place has all the dreamy enchantment of a fulfillment center. The elves, we are told, work 364 days a year and only have December 26 off. Like their colleagues at Amazon, they could use a better contract.

Two sizes too small, this is a buddy comedy that unpacks and pairs up a pair of stock action figures after Santa Claus is kidnapped by Norse witch Grýla (Kiernan Shipka). To save Christmas, the big guy’s 300-year-old head of security, Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), must team up with Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), a sleazy, cynical hacker and deadbeat dad. “Do I look human?” Drift at one point rhetorically asks his mismatched partner, and even if you ignore his iconic cartoon physique, the answer is once again “no”: The Rock is by default a stony, humorless glower, and here The Rock is nothing but plastic machismo. That leaves Evans to pick up the comic slack, which he does with a bit more New Yawk attitude and pathos than strictly required. Going beyond material, this sloppy is of course not a big lift. For the most part, his performance leaves a warm and fuzzy gratitude that Ryan Reynolds wasn’t available.

Imagine a holiday season answer to Men in black with more acronyms than jokes. When now-manji director Jake Kasdan doesn’t introduce a new wrinkle to the mythological intelligence agency run by poker-faced Lucy Liu, he bombards us with flashy attractions. The CGI stock-stoppers include a trio of villainous snowmen, a Hot Wheels car magically scaled to full-size Lamborghini proportions, and a talking polar bear with no personality. The effects have a glaring inconsistency familiar to the age of blockbuster crunch. To squint at them is to feel sympathy for the overworked, non-union artists who probably sacrificed a vacation or two to get a release date solid enough before the script was written.

As a spectacle, Red One is sub-Marvel, a further degradation of the unifying entertainment model. The characters speak in canned jokes: “Use your words,” says one when another is speechless. “I’m right here,” he replies when they talk about him as if he’s not there. Was a single scene shot on an actual set? The entire film is lit like a digital fireplace, bathing the actors in a chintzy synthetic glow. The action scenes – like the one where Santa is nabbed and Drift stalks across the screensaver landscape of the North Pole – are dark, choppy and weightless. For an additional cost, families can experience these joyless theme park rides through the immersive magic of D-BOX or 4DX. You’ll really think you’re watching the movie in a draughty theater during a blizzard while unruly kids kick the back of your seat.

There is exactly one inspired sequence in Red One. It’s the stretch where Drift and O’Malley fall into the clutches of Santa’s estranged, sadistic demon brother, Krampus, played by Game of Thrones scene-stealer Kristofer Hivju. The fun is all in the Norwegian character actor’s flamboyant performance – the arrogant theatricality he projects beneath his elaborate prosthetics. Here, and only here, Red One feels like it’s even reaching for a gag, rather than trying (and failing) to run toward laughs on the back of its premise. If the mere thought of Santa needing a bodyguard doesn’t leave you in stitches, it’ll be a chilly couple of hours.

What’s downright offensive about Red One is its disingenuous gesture toward some kind of celebration of the purity of childhood. “We work for the children,” Santa tells Drift, who is considering retirement and can no longer look past their parents’ cruelty and greed. This treatise, a sentimental ode to the true spirit of Christmas, is pretty rich coming from such a crude, rowdy holiday diversion with no greater ambition than to shake a few extra bucks out of the pockets of families looking to kill some time during the winter holidays. If this movie were a toy you’d find on a shelf (or, let’s be real, an Amazon wish list), it’d be the kind of jewelry that’s expensive in price, cheap to build, and destined for a place in the landfill .

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