We have only just left the spooky month of October, leaving Halloween behind us, and just a few days into November, we’re celebrating the holiday spirits with a Christmas movie, featuring some huge A-listers and a plot that seemingly has potential. Everyone loves sitting down in the living room, surrounded by family, and watching a Christmas movie. There’s a lovely warm sensation about it, and it always ends with a feeling of euphoria. Red One doesn’t provide that sense of euphoria, at least not all the way throughout. There are some highlights that come out of this film, but overall, it all feels like the craziest fever dream that I’ve ever had.
Red One comes in full holiday spirit as it follows Santa Claus (J. K. Simmons), who gets kidnapped on Christmas Eve. It’s up to the North Pole’s head of security, Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), to rescue Santa Claus before Christmas Day arrives, but to do this, he must team up with an unlikely ally, the world’s most infamous bounty hunter, Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans). Together, they’ll cross the globe in search of Santa Claus.
The opening to the film feels very classical with a holiday film as it opens up on Christmas Eve, with a younger Jack O’Malley revealing to his friends that Santa isn’t real because he’s found where the presents are stashed. With this being the case, his father, who’s played by Marc Evan Jackson (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), enters the scene and tries to tell his son that Santa is still very much real and that he’ll still be bringing along his presents. It’s too late by this point; the dream is broken, and Jack doesn’t see a reason for behaving anymore if Santa’s not real. There’s no longer anything to fear. Cut to 30 years from that moment, and we find Jack O’Malley literally stealing candy from a baby; there’s no exaggeration there.
We come to discover he’s a hacker and is currently trying to pinpoint a hidden location for his client; this is what leads to Santa being kidnapped and O’Malley being thrown into this globe-trotting adventure. It’s here where we get introduced to some ideas that I’d love to play around with, but unfortunately the script doesn’t do a good enough job of making me want to care for this world. It’s fun getting to see the headless horsemen and abominable snowmen, but it all starts to get repetitive when each mythological creature is met with O’Malley’s needless and over-the-top reactions. At times, it can let out a little laugh, but not due to his reaction being funny but more so that I’m on his side and I’m confused by what’s actually taking place. There’s a scene where Callum shows off this new gadget that allows him to turn small while he’s fighting, and it’s one of the many disorienting and off-putting visuals to grace the screen, but it’s only made better when O’Malley says “that was disturbing” right afterwards.
With Jack Kasdan taking a break from Jumanji to come and direct Red One, it was expected that we would get another fun adventure; he was ideally the perfect director for this film. Alongside him, also coming from Jumanji, was also Dwayne Johnson, and while it’s unfortunate to say, I can’t blame the script on why Dwayne’s character, Callum, was one of the most boring characters in the film. Well, the script can be partially blamed. It has been proven time and time again that Dwayne Johnson doesn’t have any range when it comes down to his acting, and we’re still waiting for the day where he shows off his skills, but Red One is not that film; it once again feels like he’s playing a character he’s played before. Swap around his character from Jumanji and Red One would play out almost exactly the same.
Jack O’Malley’s dialogue gets rather tiresome after a while but watching his character still manages to be quite entertaining as Chris Evans gives off a somewhat decent performance. There’s not much you can expect from a film that doesn’t know what it’s doing but also doing too much at the same time. While watching Red One, it was easy to tell through Evans performance that he was having a lot of fun while on set and playing this character. It’s a character that perfectly fits him, he has charm, charisma, wit and he’s also cheeky, this all makes for a really fun character to follow and Chris Evans really does his best to give all of his energy to his performance with this character but is let down by its poor script.
The concept of the story is one that I thoroughly like the sound of. It’s a world where mythological creatures exist and are kept under a close eye by a secret organisation that handles them. To top it off, Santa Claus is also real, he’s built, has bodyguards, a talking polar bear, hates macarons and he has this huge city hidden in the North Pole like it’s Wakanda or Themyscira. Pair that up with a witch who wants to punish everyone that’s naughty, kidnapping Santa to use his energy and the addition of Krampus, it sounds like we have one huge Christmas blockbuster on our hands. This all immediately falls apart once Chris Morgan, who wrote Shazam!: Fury of the Gods, enters the scene to write the script.
We learn from the start that O’Malley is only living this lifestyle because he discovered as a kid that there’s no Santa, meaning as a kid, he no longer has nothing to fear; there is no punishment. Callum wants to retire because there’s more people on the naughty list than the nice list, and it’s only getting worse each year. The villain, Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), wants to punish everyone on the naughty list and everyone who has ever been on it, as the people of Earth don’t have anything to fear; she wants to give them something to fear so that there’s only good people on the planet. This is all really interesting stuff, and even writing this out and reading it back, it confuses me how this film falls flat. It falls into a lot of cliches with how they structure the story and how the dialogue’s written.
Red One is rated PG-13, but it’s hard to tell who this film is really aimed at. There’s a lot more swearing than I expected, and when initially going in, I for some reason thought this movie was a 15 but was then surprised when I saw a kid walking into the screening. The tone of the entire film feels nonexistent, and it doesn’t know which audience it’s trying to target, and even after watching the film and having some time to think about it, I still have no idea who this film, in its current state, was made for.
To top it all off, this movie has an overall star-studded cast with Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, J.K. Simmons, Lucy Liu, Kiernan Shipka, Bonnie Hunt, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, and Nick Kroll. This feels like 2024’s Amsterdam—a good recipe but not the right chef to handle the meal. Red One also had DNEG attached for its visuals, the same visual effect company that worked on Dune: Part Two and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga but also the same company that worked on Borderlands and Venom: The Last Dance. While most of their work is usually good, that side of them doesn’t show within this film.
Red One lacks in too many departments for it to be considered a recommendable watch for the Christmas period. The visuals are beyond embarrassing with CGI that isn’t up to par and composition that is beyond noticeable with the many green screen shots that are used throughout the film. The script doesn’t offer anything special for this story that has a lot of potential, and ultimately, the cast feels wasted as no one aside from Chris Evans and J.K. Simmons for the few times he was in the film really gives off a performance that makes it worth staying for the entire two-hour run. After watching Red One, it feels like I’ve been placed on the naughty list because no one on the nice list deserves to go through the same experience that I’ve just gone through.
Red One releases in theaters on November 15 in the US and out now in the UK.
