An overly familiar Christmas-action mashup that’s too similar to every other movie The Rock’s made over the last decade.
PLOT: When Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) is kidnapped from the North Pole on the day before Christmas, his head of security, Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), must team with an untrustworthy tracker (Chris Evans) to find him and save both Christmas and the world!
REVIEW: Red One is the very definition of a streaming movie. While it’s getting a theatrical release, it seems tailor-made as a movie meant to please the algorithm and audiences looking for an easily digestible family action film they can break up in pieces. Despite running only two hours, it’s striking similar in structure to Dwayne Johnson’s Netflix hit, Red Notice, in that it’s little more than a series of generic action set pieces strung together and designed as “world-building” in the hopes, I suppose, that this will turn out to be a perennial hit for Prime Video. It hits theatres this week, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see it surface on streaming before the Holiday season kicks into high gear.
Really, that’s probably where a movie like this belongs, as in a theatrical setting it feels like a surprisingly tough sit, with it anchored around some “buddy” chemistry which never really surfaces. Here, Johnson’s upstanding Callum Drift is partnered with Chris Evans’s scheming Jack O’Malley, with us supposed to be charmed by the fact that they start out at each other’s throats in classic buddy movie tradition. However, those pairings are lightning in a bottle, with Johnson and Evans doing the same wannabe Tango & Cash pairing we’ve seen fall flat too many times. I get it – when it works (such as in Deadpool & Wolverine), it’s golden, but Johnson and Evans are playing too close to type here without ever really poking fun at themselves. It’s a formula Johnson’s done again and again, but has it ever really worked?
Red One plunges us into the middle of a high-tech North Pole, where Santa Claus is a jacked J.K. Simmons, who has a security network that puts the Pentagon to shame. Johnson’s Drift is his number one guy, but he’s just resigned, as he’s despondent over how much the naughty list has grown over the years. Of course, when Santa is taken, he teams up with Lucy Liu’s head of MORA (Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority) to find ol’ St Nick.
Director Jake Kasdan is an old hand at movies like this, having directed The Rock in two Jumanji movies, and Red One is done very much in the same style. We’re supposed to find it hilarious that Johnson is basically an ELF, and a pal of Santa’s, with many jokes directed at how imposing and scary a guy he is – but is Johnson really that anymore? We always see him play these kinds of super-imposing, soft-hearted heroes, making his casting feel like old hat.
Evans isn’t that much more effective as Jack O’Malley, who’s supposed to be such a degenerate that the movie opens with him literally stealing candy from a baby. Yet, the movie also gives him an estranged son to care about, and who wants to bet that by the time the credits roll, this former member of the “naughty” list will have a change of heart?
One thing about Red One is that it plays like a Marvel movie without the superheroes, with heavy doses of CG creatures and a villain no one will really care about, with Kiernan Shipka’s witch, Grýla, never allowed to become too threatening. Like other streaming movies, it feels like an algorithm threw together Jumanji, Marvel, and Christmas, spitting out the idea for this, with the script by Chris Morgan (one of the Fast Saga’s masterminds) utterly generic.
Indeed, there’s pretty much nothing anyone does in Red One that hasn’t been done a lot better elsewhere. Heck, if you want to see a really badass Christmas action flick, look no further than Violent Night. Red One is really only worthwhile if you’re desperate for some inoffensive entertainment for the kids, but otherwise this is just a big old lump of coal.
