Jonah Naplan   November 15, 2024

“Red One” is the latest entry in a series of commercially-produced big-budget movies with recognizable stars typically released during the Christmas season or the summertime. A lot of them have featured Dwayne Johnson, as this one does, or Tom Holland, Ryan Reynolds, Chris Pratt, Ryan Gosling or Will Smith. At best, they’re usually harmless, mindless entertainment designed for viewing after switching your brain off. These sorts of blockbusters are typically directed at families with teenagers as per their use of adult jokes mixed in between the slapstick, and a lot of them don’t remain a conversation topic after a month of release. It is also the newest addition to an ongoing trend of films that expand or variate on Christmas lore and traditions such as “Violent Night” or “Bad Santa,” two movies about a very R-rated Saint Nick. 

This film’s Santa Claus is a muscular J.K. Simmons who gets kidnapped from his elaborate North Pole headquarters by the evil witch Grýla (Kiernan Shipka) on a mission to complete what the kindhearted Kris Kringle has neglected to do for centuries: punish those on the naughty list. Responsible for retrieving him, Santa’s bodyguard Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson) enlists the “world’s best tracker” Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), a “level four naughty-lister” who inadvertently revealed Saint Nick’s location to the kidnappers in the first place, to help him. Their escapade runs them through a plethora of setpieces, including an action sequence in Hawaii and a slapping fight at the fortress of Santa’s estranged brother Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), who also happens to have dated Grýla back in the day.

It’s all in good spirit, similar to the hijinks of director Jake Kasdan’s “Jumanji” movies, but “Red One” ultimately lacks the creative streak and funny bone that this amount of assembled talent should have brought. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve already seen its best bits, and there’s only so many laughs that can be juiced out of the irony of characters discussing things like the naughty list, flying reindeer, and elves while holding a straight face. The crux of the movie’s humor comes from watching Johnson and Evans bicker and banter back and forth like immature teenagers who’ve just been assigned a school project together. Johnson performs his usual shtick of delivering jagged dad jokes with an unflinching stoicism to the appropriately disdainful Evans. Callum’s character is basically a wizard with his repertoire of gadgets and gizmos that allow him to teleport places in seconds and enlarge and shrink everyday objects, including himself, at will. But he’s recently entered the North Pole equivalent of a “crisis of faith,” not feeling the Christmas spirit anymore as the “naughty population” increases by 20% annually. He’s about to turn in his letter of resignation just before Santa is kidnapped and gets thrown into the thick of adventure once again.

Jack has never been one for Christmas spirit. He’s a reckless grouch meandering through life. His son back home named Dylan (Wesley Kimmel) feels neglected by his constant absence, and his ex-wife (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) knows it. “Red One” ultimately becomes a story of salvation for both of the two leads as they rediscover the magic of Christmas in a way that even children will understand. But the movie doesn’t linger on these sentiments for very long because there’s a big blockbuster beast to feed. To that point, it’s baffling how cheap most of the giant setpieces are considering the film’s exorbitant budget of $250 million. Most of the CGI effects look ugly and half-developed, and the entire movie is painted with an artificial glaze that ruins the lighting of nighttime scenes.

The best compositions are actually the North Pole scenes, which sparkle with a warm vibe that the rest of the movie was aiming for. Bonnie Hunt is actually quite wonderful as Mrs. Klaus and the utopia her and her husband have created is the only location in the movie that truly feels lived in. Everything from the toy-making workshops to the special forces headquarters (of which a no-nonsense Lucy Liu is the boss) is wonderfully imaginative, and a sequence late in the movie that shows how Santa actually pulls off his annual scheme of delivering presents to hundreds of millions of homes that’s choreographed, charted out and rehearsed for 364 days of the year is the coolest part of the film.

The rest of the movie, however, lacks cohesion. Scenes don’t feel like continuations of each other, instead reading as singular events linked by the same characters. All the “mystical” sequences are particularly inexplicable. At times it doesn’t even feel like Johnson is in the same room as Evans as they’re battling all sorts of inhumans. Watching the movie is ultimately as much of a mind-numbing experience as it is a mind-straining one. Scanning the screen for the outlines of characters as they’re absorbed by obfuscating shadows is a mental task that itself empties out all of your energy in the first twenty minutes.

Any kinetic thrills that “Red One” may have to offer arrive in short bursts and it is in those moments that you wish the whole movie could have been just as exciting. At an overlong 124 minutes, the film is oddly paced for an audience of such a broad demographic, with plenty of extended sequences in the middle where nothing actually happens. And it wraps up in a dopamine-packed finale on a North Pole bridge with a murderer’s row of Christmas icons showing up, strutting their stuff and then abruptly exiting soon afterwards. It almost certainly could have been worse. But it also could have been better, which is the reigning frustration.

Will “Red One” become a new modern Christmas classic? Probably not. It has enough big names on its face to strike up a storm during November and December, but it won’t have any lasting effects after its prime. Johnson, himself, already has another movie to promote this season, that of “Moana 2,” and Evans will surely move on to something bigger and better in due diligence. Though “Red One” could have been a cinematic breakthrough this holiday, its handful of pleasures make it only a stocking stuffer.

Now playing in theaters.