Henry O'Brien
Have you ever wondered how Santa Claus is able to sneak into billions of homes across the planet in just one night and give gifts? Have you ever considered that if Santa accomplishes this every Christmas, he has to run the North Pole like a multinational corporation? Jake Kasdan’s Red One technically features supposed answers to those questions.
However, the film feels like a cruel Christmas joke or some really bad eggnog. The film, which follows a hacker and thief (Chris Evans) and the head of North Pole security (Dwayne Johnson) on a quest to save Saint Nick (Oscar winner J.K. Simmons, also seen currently in Juror #2) from being kidnapped, adds new wrinkles to the Christmas genre but ultimately lands on being a frustratingly stale story. With bland CGI and action sequences that lack any form of excitement, Red One lands as one of the weaker holiday movies ever.
To the film’s credit, the premise has some hints of originality. Kasdan takes great care to show how Mr. and Mrs. Claus are running an Amazon-style production at the North Pole with an emphasis on efficiency. Johnson’s character, Callum Drift, is not only in charge of protecting the big man as part of the Enforcement Logistics and Fortification unit (ELF, if you don’t get it) but is also his fitness trainer to stay in peak form. Additionally, Santa is treated like the President; the sleigh receives protection from countries around the globe as if it were Air Force One. There are mentions of multilateral agreements with the North Pole, governments and companies.
All of these details feel so out of place for a Christmas movie, but they work because it’s such a clear new take on what makes the toy delivery business tick. Both Santa and Drift seem to be getting a little tired of the business, as if this way of doing things can be tiresome and cumbersome. If only the movie could’ve spent 90 minutes on that.
The movie instead opts to make Evans’ character, Jack “The Wolf” O’Malley, a key plot driver. O’Malley gets his nickname from being a notorious black-hat hacker but barely does any hacking throughout the film. We only see that he’s a criminal from an early sequence where he pickpockets and breaks his way into a facility where he can find the information that unwittingly reveals Santa’s location. This leads him to go on a globe-trotting expedition with Drift, where Evans and Johnson struggle to maintain any form of convincing chemistry on screen.
To make matters worse, Red One attempts to weave in O’Malley’s backstory, where he never believed in Santa, partially due to his never having parents to raise him, into a larger message about the power of the Christmas spirit. This, along with his life of crime, leads O’Malley to become a deadbeat father who detests having to spend any time with his son (Wesley Kimmel). But the script, written by Fast & Furious screenwriter Chris Morgan and originally from producer Hiram Garcia, does not even put a modicum of effort or time into examining O’Malley, only through hollow exposition that the viewer can approximate because it has been shown time and time again.
For Red One to be about the spirit of Christmas isn’t shocking in the slightest, given the genre. But if there was any hope for the film to be rollicking fun for people to see around the holidays, Kasdan’s latest work assuages any notions of that. As O’Malley and Drift have to save Santa from a shape-shifting witch of Icelandic folklore, Grýla (Kiernan Shipka), they fight against monstrous snowmen on the beaches of Aruba or play a slapping contest against Krampus (Kristofer Hivju).
These sequences suffer from bland effects that struggle to capture any sense of magic and excitement. Chase sequences lack a sense of geography that can, at times, confuse a viewer but also highlight how many of the environments are just green screens somewhere in Atlanta. Obviously, every big blockbuster these days will have computer-generated technology. But Red One’s setting effects, along with unimaginative character designs for the elves or polar bear bodyguard Garcia (voiced by Reinaldo Faberlle), hamper the experience of conjuring feelings of wonder or joy.
The film suffers from being just a mediocre and derivative Christmas movie. The best chance this movie would be remembered is if it was a complete and total trainwreck in both production and storytelling. Aside from Johnson’s tardiness, which had added a reported $50 million to the budget, it was never a disaster. It was just a boring time. If there’s anything that the movie will be known for, it is Johnson’s bluster about how, after seeing Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, he pushed for this picture to be on IMAX.
It’s gonna… rock! See what we did there, @TheRock? #RedOneMovie pic.twitter.com/H0pvoZSaG3
— IMAX (@IMAX) November 11, 2024
Comparing your own movie to the most recent Best Picture winner is already a stretch. For Johnson to say that about Red One means he deserves some coal in his stocking on December 25.
