Red One

3 outta 5

Red One is an action-comedy Christmas film, which feels a lot like the superhero FX blockbusters of the last few years, with big brawls and lots of quips. It is trying so hard to be bombastic and outsized it ends up being a bit too long, cutting out about fifteen minutes from a two-hour movie would have helped. Also, some parts get a little overly serious while the film is at its best when it is concentrating on mayhem. There is basically one central joke, Christmas magic as a serious action movie, that does remain funny. It mostly just skates by on being kind of bizarrely fun take on the Christmas mythos mashed up with a sci-fi magic action spy movie.

Santa (J.K. Simmons) is preparing for the night he travels around the world to deliver presents on Christmas Eve, with the help of Mrs. Claus (Bonnie Hunt), his vast army of helpers, a talking polar bear agent, and his head of security, Callum (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson). But when he is kidnapped, they send out Callum to go find him. With the assistance of the secret organization led by Harlow (Lucy Liu) they track down the hacker, Jack (Chris Evans) who got paid to lead the bad guys to Santa. Now they must find the shady crooks Jack was dealing with, which annoys Callum as Jack is firmly on Santa’s Naughty List. It turns out that Santa is in the clutches of the evil Winter Witch, Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), and to free him Callum and Jack must travel across the globe and even meeting the dark and powerful brother of Santa, Krampus (Kristofer Hivju). And, shockingly, Gryla’s scheme is bigger than just kidnapping Santa but may endanger the entire world and even Callum’s estranged son, Dylan (Wesley Kimmel).

The world building is a bit too in-depth for what should be a dopey action movie. Taking a page from franchise filmmaking, there’s a secret organization that investigates all magical creatures that is also a part of the hunt for Santa. It is basically one joke when they say they’re “rounding up the usual suspects” about Santa’s disappearance and them having the headless horseman in captivity. It feels suspiciously close to spin-off world building that happens a lot in franchise filmmaking. Even casting a name actor like Liu in an exposition part (she still delivers her lines with gusto though) is like seeing her to be set up as the lead of a spin-off.

The central hook of the film is that of many a buddy action comedy throughout the ages, the straight and narrow methodical guy and the quipping sidekick. Evans’ reactions are mostly along the lines of him repeating loudly and confused about what someone just told him, that Santa is real, that magic is real, etc. Evans has some funny bits like when they end up at a resort beach and Jake says that it’s been fun but he is going to live there and marry a random bikini girl. The film comedically establishes that he isn’t a good guy, as at the start of the film and is literally stealing candy from a baby, and he’s quite pleased with himself too. It is an easy, cheap and corny joke? Probably, but there are a lot of those here.

Johnson plays it incredibly straight, like when he is saying so very seriously about how there are more people on the naughty than nice list that it gets a laugh for being so absurd. There’s also a good scene when Callum talks about the difficulty of Santa’s job, saying that it would take a human like Jake a decade to read Santa’s list, and Callum says with reverence Santa is able to read it twice. As this is a Christmas movie it does become schmaltzy every once in a while. Jake is a comically inept father to his kid which gets a few laughs but the last-minute change where they have a serious chat doesn’t land well.

Simmons as the Buff Santa is an interesting take on the character, as he is working out constantly to keep in shape for Christmas Eve, although once he gets kidnapped he spends most of the movie sleeping. The few moments of Hunt as Mrs. Claus has her looking earnest but she is a part of an interesting twist near the end. Shipka as the Winter Witch gets to deliver a lot of lines rather bombastically, it is nifty that a pretty petite woman is actually a powerful super-witch (something Shipka did for years on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), and she gets to transform at the end. There is a moment when she possesses some guy to deliver an evil monologue like a demon which clashes with the tone of carefree action comedy family film. The inclusion of Krampus as the brother of Santa is a neat twist drawing from Christmas mythology, and he gets in a good bit where he gets to smack The Rock around, and the makeup job on Hivju is really elaborate.

Red One probably won’t be remembered as a Christmas Classic, and frankly if Amazon wants to get any views over the holidays they should put it on PrimeVideo for free in about four weeks. But as just a wacky Christmas action film with a lot of dumb jokes, it is good enough.