Chris Evans and The Rock slog through streaming-grade holiday cheer in Red One
The Christmas caper has a few moments of inspiration, but mostly it reimagines the holiday as an Amazon subsidiary.
Photo: Amazon MGM Studios
For a single sequence in the middle of Red One, a new Christmas-themed caper simultaneously aimed at all audiences and none at all, the movie snaps to life, as if jolting out of a narcotized haze. Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), a longtime security man for none other than Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) is on the trail of his kidnapped boss, and has recruited cynical, ill-behaved “naughty-lister” Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) to help him. Their shruggy “try asking this guy, I guess” quest has led them to the hidden land of Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), a fearsome creature with ties to Santa. Suddenly, the movie is awash in elaborate, practical-effects makeup jobs, with enough Christmas-adjacent beasts to fill, well, maybe not the famous cantina on Tatooine, but perhaps a more modest pub in a similar neighborhood. Jack, attempting to scam their way out of danger, gets Callum involved in a competitive slapping game. The slapstick is funny, taking advantage of Johnson’s ability to take a hit. The effects look neat, as if designed out of pure love of the form. There’s a bit of tangible atmosphere—some genuine movie magic, even, without nudging the audience to widen their eyes in wonder.
Before and after this sequence, Red One is a slog. Perhaps it was included as a way for director Jake Kasdan to issue a sideways, half-measure apology: Look, all you Zero Effect fans, that kind of movie is clearly dead and buried, but something as passably entertaining as those Jumanji movies isn’t off the table. More chilling, it seems possible that the filmmakers convinced themselves that the rest of the movie was more or less on this same level of good fun, perhaps because it’s not actively hateful.
Red One is, however, a distinctly joyless execution of a premise that’s supposed to overflow with imagination, the better to eventually overwhelm the degenerate tracker Jack, who, naturally, has a fractured relationship with his young son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel) that needs repairing. But the movie’s invention is largely in service of rebranding the North Pole as a cool, spy-like (or at least Spy Kids-like) operation that utilizes both enchantments and a staff of thousands to deliver presents every year; it’s a bit like asking kids and adults alike to rediscover the true meaning of Christmas by thinking about how great it would be if Red One parent company Amazon had access to ancient magiks.