Red One is the first new Christmas movie of the year, starring Dwayne Johnson as the zealous head of Santa’s security detail and Chris Evans as an unscrupulous hacker he’s forced to team up with.
The plot is simple enough: Santa Claus is kidnapped by the Christmas Witch (Kiernan Shipka), who wants to eliminate every person who has ever been on the naughty list and needs his magic to make it happen. That means it’s up to Callum Drift (Johnson) and Jack O’Malley (Evans) with an assist from Director of the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority Zoe (Lucy Liu) to save Christmas.
There’s a thick layer of Jason Bourne-esque militarism that seriously dampens the fun of the movie. I felt it was an odd choice in the beginning of the movie to have Santa’s sleigh stationed at a military base while he was yucking it up with the kids in the mall. That early sign spins out into overt militarization of Christmas.
This is a problem for two reasons. Dwayne Johnson, who if nothing else is charismatic, is reduced to a humorless lump of Special Forces cliches. If there’s anyone who should have been able to pull off “Rescue Santa but make it fun,” it should be The Rock. But the script gives him nothing to do except be a rock. Arnold Schwarzenegger showed how to be a burly man in an absurd Christmas comedy with Jingle All the Way; Johnson’s performance could have used much more of that self-effacing charm.
Most importantly, there’s no magic to anything. It’s all just military-grade dual-use technology that allows the cool stuff to happen. Toys turning into the real thing? Some wrist device that Johnson deploys. ELF? An acronym for Enforcement, Logistics and Fortification, or as Johnson calls it, “Extremely Large Department of Law.” The portals that allow Drift and O’Malley to warp from one place to another? It’s the North Pole Field Network Transit System. Everything has a name, an acronym and an explanation that suck the imagination out of the affair.
The dour militarism of the film is only made worse by the visuals. Red One is a dark movie, and I mean that literally, as most of the movie takes place at night in the North Pole. The film relies heavily on CGI and other modern movie magic; it frankly doesn’t look realistic enough to be impressive or cartoony enough to be whimsical. It feels like the film is dark in an attempt to hide the lackluster visual effects.
The one saving grace of the film is Chris Evans. He’s likable as an amoral scoundrel who sneaks and weasels his way out of all responsibility and commitments. When the time comes for his heart to grow three sizes (because what kind of Christmas movie would this be if it didn’t?), Evans actually manages to draw out some real feelings in the otherwise bland emotional landscape of the film.
Red One is not a great start to the holiday season, but thankfully we can write this one off. We haven’t reached Thanksgiving yet, which is when the holiday season really begins, despite the attempts to make it Christmastime earlier and earlier every year. We can just relegate Red One to the post-Halloween candy hangover.
