The holiday themed action-adventure Red One is a very silly movie. That’s not a knock against it, but rather a compliment. The best yuletide fantasies often carry with them a high concept premise that works well with an already highly mythologized, magically outlandish season. While some might balk at the idea of the Christmas season serving as the backdrop for an effects heavy, pun laden, goofball romp about saving Santa Claus from a terrorist witch, I happily invite the messy, go-for-broke romp that director Jake Kasdan delivers with Red One. It’s not high art, and its seasonal sparkle is all window dressing, but sometimes all one needs to get in the Christmas spirt is some spiked eggnog and a sugar rush. That’s all I required of Red One, and that’s just what I got.
Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson) has been the bodyguard for jolly old St. Nick (J.K. Simmons) for hundreds of years, but the devoted leader of the ELF force (don’t ask me what it stands for because I honestly don’t remember) has decided it’s time for a change. Cal still loves how Nick makes the kids happy, but he finds the adults growing more insufferable by the day. But two days before retirements (ain’t it always the way?), Cal faces his biggest crisis when Nick is kidnapped from his secret, heavily fortified compound, putting the whole season in jeopardy. Cal’s only hope of finding Santa before the big day rests in locating world’s greatest tracker Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), a.k.a. “The Wolf,” which sounds cool, but really he’s just a jerk of a deadbeat dad who’ll literally steal candy from a baby and racks up gambling debts at an alarming rate. Despite ranking high on the naughty list and being a lifelong non-believer, Jack was the person who discovered Santa’s compound and sold the information to Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), an ancient witch who wants to harness all of Nick’s magic to punish all the naughty people in the world.
Kasdan (the recent Jumanji films with Johnson, Walk Hard, Orange County) frames Red One like a traditional Hollywood Christmas blockbuster crossed with the potty mouthed, repartee filled action flicks of noted yuletide enthusiast Shane Black. Red One, filled with cursing, jokes only adults would understand, borderline excessive violence, and no shortage of eerie creepiness that could spook the little ones, isn’t a movie that all families would necessarily vibe with, but it’s easy to enjoy provided that one doesn’t think about it all that much. The script from Chris Morgan – who had a hand in every Fast and Furious movie from Tokyo Drift to the eighth instalment – isn’t doing anything more ridiculous than he has already done in his career. Holiday movies already require a healthy suspension of disbelief because the concept of Santa and what they do for a living is already patently ludicrous to think about, so the idea of Johnson and Evans bantering and beating people up around the world to save Christmas wasn’t a stretch too far for me.
Johnson and Evans don’t have a lot of comedic or dramatic chemistry together, which makes the mismatched buddy element of Red One’s action comedy formula a bit lacking, but individually they turn in fun performances. Johnson does a wonderful job of keeping a straight face and playing this goofiness with a surgical degree of seriousness and genuine holiday love. Evans, dipping a bit into his Massachusetts accent again, revels in playing a cartoonish antihero who’ll eventually show his softer side, make peace with his son (Wesley Kimmel), and learn the true meaning of… well, he just learns that Christmas is pretty cool. Shipka nicely camps things up as the primary antagonist, Nick Kroll pops up for a small stint as a nervous, but tough talking criminal middleman, and Lucy Liu exudes confidence as Cal’s boss, the head of a group that oversees all mythical and magical creatures (which, to be fair, sound like a cooler concept for a movie than this). Not all the cast members gel perfectly together, but they all came to play in the sandbox just the same.
Red One is overlong (somehow finding a way to clock in over two hours) and takes too much time to get to the point, but once the cogs are in place, the cast is let loose, and Kasdan is allowed to run wild with the set pieces. Dressing the scenery in reds, greens, and golds before promptly blowing them all to the North Pole, Kasdan keeps things exciting and engaging, even though the story itself never finds a proper tone. There are plenty of CGI laden battles between good and evil, and unlike a lot of tentpole blockbusters this season, Red One actually makes them look good and as if the studio gave the craftspeople time to finish their jobs instead of rushing things out to make a release date. The creature designs – a blend of practical and digital effects – are particularly of note, with Red One populated by plenty of eye catching elves, trolls, penguins, and abominable snowmen, with a hulking slap-happy Krampus (Kristofer Hivju) and a kindly polar bear warrior (voiced by Reinaldo Faberlle) playing major parts in the story.
There’s plenty of spirit to be found in Red One, but whether or not you think of that as the Christmas variety depends on what you want from a holiday movie. I can fully see Red One not being everyone’s bag, but I don’t apologize for liking it. When I watch a Christmas movie I either want straight up sincerity or silly spun sugar. This is the latter, and like most great seasonal movies, I could see myself watching it again whenever this time of year rolls around. It’s not a great movie, but definitely a fun one.
Red One opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, November 15, 2024.
