Christmas movies have always been something of a mixed bag. Ignoring the near endless stream of sacherine nonsense pumped out by the Hallmark Channel over the years, Hollywood has tried to capture the essence of the holidays by throwing virtually every genre that exists at it from the John Wick-y action comedy Violent Night to the winter chills of Black Christmas, to the more family friendly likes of Miracle On 34th Street. However, 2024 seems to be the turn of the gargantuan special effects action/comedy Red One as Dwayne Johnson reteams with Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle director Jake Kasdan to give the season a bit of the old jingle bell Rock – if you get my drift.
Joined by the likes of Chris Evans, J.K. Simmons, Lucy Liu and more CGI than an entire phase of the MCU, can this latest swing at the legend of St. Nick bring anything new, or does end up being a swift kick directly into Santa’s sack?
Just so we’re all clear, Santa Claus is real and his famously complicated task of delivering the world’s presents in one single night is doable thanks to the vast and complex support team he has around him which is headed up by his hulking head of security, Callum Drift. However, after hundreds of years of loyal service, the shallowness of modern culture has left Drift feeling that he’s lost the faith a little and much to Santa’s dismay, his number one guy is considering handing in his resignation. Of course, this proves to be the perfect moment for a mysterious band of terrorists to swoop down onto the secret location of Santa’s workshop, infiltrate its Wakanda style defences and kidnap jolly old St Nick right out of his own kitchen before making a complete getaway with only twelve hours left until Christmas.
While the trail is colder than a polar year’s pee pee, the director of MORA (Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority) manages to snag one lead – the man who managed to locate Santa’s base in the first place.
Meet Hack O’Malley, a super cynical, in it for himself, mercenary hacker whose selfish tendencies are only matched by his skills to locate any one of thing on the planet and after the forces of MORA manage to bring him in, he’s forced to team with Drift in order to locate and rescue Santa in time. With that, we cue the usual buddy movie tropes as both Drift and Jack (a level 4 Naughty Lister) repeatedly butt heads as they’re forced to face a flush of festive foes in order to save Christmas that include enemy mercs; murderous snowmen; a trip to visit Santa’s estranged brother, the Krampus and a showdown with a vengful snow witch.
However, with time ticking down and Jack’s mercurial and untrustworthy nature proving to be an issue, can this duo possibly hope to get this adventure all wrapped up in time?
Red One is one of those movies that often doesn’t actually feel like a real movie. What I mean by that is that the premise, execution and casting feels so overwhemingly cynical, at times I genuinely believed I was watching clips from the kind of fake film you get in movies like Tropic Tunder that’s supposed to play like a spoof. But no; as the running time forges onward, reality soon sets in and before you know it, you realise that someone has actually taken the type of coked-up, oddly soulless concept that only exists to aggressively make money that Frank Cross from Scrooged would have greenlighted – only for real.
While we try to digest this fact like Santa trying to muscle down a stale Christmas cookie, we can see that director Jake Kasdan is in full Marvel mode here, whipping up S.H.I.E.L.D.-like secret organisations that apparently keep the mythical world under wraps until the powers that be are able to presumably unleash a whole host of seasonal based spin offs whether we want them too or not. However, the main issue is that despite a huge amount of world building (something we know Kasdan has a knack for thanks to his Jumanji sequels), none of the world of Red One feels particularly fresh. Over the years, movies like Elf, Fred Claus and (obviously) Santa Claus: The Movie have stretched their imaginations and budgets to visualise the world of Santa’s workshop, but this weirdly militarised version just seems like it’s been assembled piecemeal from other movies and the presence of a colossal, anthropomorphic polar bear named Garcia doesn’t do much to distract us.
Then there’s the characters who each seem like the most standard group of personality types for this kind of movie to the point where you wonder if this movie was actually created by AI. Remember when Dwayne Johnson used to play people with an edge? Well not here; because Drift ends up being yet another example of his tough but nice good guys who seems to be there entirely to convince us that Johnson’s a great human being in real life too. While playing his burly but sensitive goodnik as Luke Hobbs from Fast And Furious would have been overkill, he seems to be playing the exact, forgettable character type he falls back on in movies like Rampage and Red Notice and you wonder if the dude has all but given up. Fairly somewhat better is Evans’ swaggering scumbag, but one again you feel like the former Captain America is now just playing variations on his asshole from Knives Out just to play with his image and his predictable journey to good guy is so over-familiar at this point you can probably predict the exact time in the film he sees the light from about twenty minutes into the movie. Add to this Lucy Liu doing her usual, stern secret agent thing from the Charlie’s Angels movies and you have vurtually an entire cast that’s going through the motions and for a film with such a huge, fantasy canvas, is shows a stunning lack of imagination.
Even the action beats are compromised by some of the murkiest CGI I’ve seen in a big budget movie in ages that render almost every big moment as thoroughly underwhelming as Kiernan Shipka’s one note villain. However, while it feels like Amazon Prime has made an over-budgeted movie worthy of the blandness usually reserved for Netflix, there are a complete of noticable moments that work rather nicely. The first is J.K. Simmons’ jacked, blue collar Santa who seems to be the only actor here actually managing to project the heart that a very silly Christmas action movie like this desperately needs to flourish and he seems to be single handedly trying to keep the corporate synergy back with every line reading – to bad he’s rendered unconscious for over half the movie. However, by far the best moments in the movie belong to Game Of Thrones’ Kristofer Hivju who is buried under mounds of make up to play a booze drinking Krampus who loves indulging in violent games of the face bruising Krampusschlap while surrounded by a baying crowd of similarly misshapen followers.
However, this ultimately proves to be a serving of blockbuster filmmaking at its most cynical and if it somehow manages to branch out into making similar adventures based around other seasonal holidays (anyone want to cast Jason Statham as an ass-kicking turkey for a Thanksgiving one? Didn’t think so.) I’ll be utterly astounded.
Red One can go do one.
🌟🌟
We Have Issues 