Erik Adams
The heroes of Red One, a glittering lump of yuletide action-comedy coal coming to a multiplex near you, travel the world via secret portals hidden in the back of toy stores. To which any child in the audience might ask, “Wait, there are stores that only sell toys?” Well, not anymore, Timmy. Such brick-and-mortar establishments have largely been wiped out by Amazon, a.k.a. the mega-corporation that bankrolled this movie. To see the company build the lore of a would-be blockbuster around a business model it destroyed is about as galling as, say, Netflix making a sitcom about Blockbuster.
Speaking of the streaming giant, Red One is not a sequel to Red Notice, though it does share a star and a general air of crass commercial indifference with that algorithmic slop. There’s something distinctly Bezosian about its vision of the most wonderful time of the year: Santa Claus, as played by an unfathomably overqualified J.K. Simmons, is a rise-and-grind mogul who hits the gym before climbing onto the sleigh and runs his operation with an efficiency that could put a twinkle in every billionaire’s eye. Early on, the movie touches down in the North Pole, and the place has all the dreamy enchantment of a fulfillment center. The elves, we’re told, work 364 days a year, taking only December 26 off. Like their counterparts at Amazon, they could use a better contract.
At two-sizes-too-small heart, this is a buddy comedy, unboxing and pairing off a couple of stock action figures after Santa is kidnapped by Nordic witch Grýla (Kiernan Shipka). To save Christmas, the big guy’s 300-year-old head of security, Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), must join forces with Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), a slovenly, cynical hacker and deadbeat dad. “Do I look human?” Drift at one point rhetorically asks his mismatched partner, and even ignoring his iconic cartoon physique, the answer is once again “no”: Defaulting to a stony, humorless glower, The Rock is all plastic machismo here. That leaves Evans to pick up the comic slack, which he does with a smidge more New Yawk attitude and pathos than strictly required. Of course, going above and beyond material this shoddy is no great lift. Mostly, his performance leaves behind 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 nu-manji director Jake Kasdan isn’t introducing some new wrinkle in the mythological intelligence agency run by a poker-faced Lucy Liu, he’s bombarding us with gaudy attractions. The CGI stocking stuffers include a trio of malevolent snowmen, a Hot Wheels car magically scaled up to full-sized Lamborghini proportions, and a talking polar bear with no personality. The effects have a garish inconsistency familiar to the age of blockbuster crunch. To subject your eyes to them is to feel pangs of sympathy for the overworked, non-unionized artists who presumably sacrificed a holiday or two to make a release date probably set in stone before the script was written.
As spectacle, Red One is sub-Marvel, a further degradation of that assembly-line entertainment model. The characters speak in canned witticisms: “Use your words,” one says when another is speechless. “I’m right here,” he retorts when they’re talking about him as though he’s not there. Was a single scene shot on an actual set? The whole movie is lit like a digital fireplace, bathing the actors in a chintzy synthetic glow. The action scenes – like the one where Santa gets nabbed, and Drift takes pursuit across the screensaver landscape of the North Pole – are dark, choppy, and weightless. For an upcharge, families can experience these joyless amusement-park rides through the immersive magic of D-BOX or 4DX. You’ll really believe you’re watching the film in a drafty theater during a blizzard while unruly children kick the back of your seat.
There’s 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, who’s played by Games 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 does Red One feel like it’s even reaching for a gag, rather than trying (and failing) to coast toward laughs on the back of its premise. If the mere thought of Santa needing a bodyguard doesn’t leave you in stitches, it’s going to be a chilly couple hours.
What’s downright insulting about Red One is its insincere feigning towards some sort of celebration of the purity of childhood. “We work for the kids,” Santa tells Drift, who’s mulling retirement and can no longer see past the cruelty and greed of their parents. That thesis, a sentimental ode to the true Christmas spirit, is pretty rich coming from such a crass, noisy holiday distraction with no greater ambition than shaking a few extra dollars from the pockets of families looking to kill some time on winter vacation. Were this movie a toy you’d find on a shelf (or, let’s be real, an Amazon wishlist), it’d be the kind of trinket that’s expensive in price, cheap in construction, and destined for a spot on the landfill.
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