Red One looked, going in, like a strong Worst Movie of the Year contender. As a star-studded, big-budget high-concept action movie for a streaming service, with a combination of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Chris Evans, Red One has a few things in common with some of the worst movies of recent years. Both actors have been good in movies in the past, but not recently, with Johnson doing much more impressive acting work in his recent return to pro wrestling than he’s done on screen in the last several years. But Red One is more enjoyable than I expected. It’s not a Christmas classic, and it gets bogged down in CGI, especially in its mess of a finale. But the script has wit, and some of the action sequences are inspired.
Red One was directed by Jake Kasdan, who made the great Zero Effect in the late-1990s and has since busied himself with Walk Hard, as well as both mediocre post-2000 Cameron Diaz sex comedies (Bad Teacher and Sex Tape) and the latter-day Jumanji movies, also starring Johnson. The writer is Chris Morgan, who had the underrated job of writing most of the latter-day Fast and Furious movies.
The conceit here is that Santa Claus (J. K. Simmons, the most jacked Santa in history) is part of a massive, highly efficient gift-delivering bureaucracy, where he’s assisted by his right-hand man Callum Drift (Johnson). The year’s Christmas plans are thrown into doubt when St. Nick is kidnapped, by a demon named Gryla (Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka, not given much to do), and it’s up to Callum to team up with a sleazy computer hacker (Evans) to save the day, and Christmas.
This takes them on a few side quests, some of which are more compelling than others. I liked a visit to a beach, where they confront Nick Kroll and a group of dangerous snowmen, as well as a visit to Germany to see Krampus (Game of Thrones’ Kristofer Hivju), who gets in an amusing slap-fight with Johnson. The world-building is mostly done well, featuring something called MORA (Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority), which is essentially a Men in Black-style regulatory body for creatures of myth, led by Lucy Liu; I would’ve been more interested in a whole movie about their work.
It’s a shame that the ending is such a CGI muddle, which takes the characters to the sky much the same way Marvel movie climaxes usually work. The film, opening in theaters first before heading to Amazon, presumably in time for Christmas, is the latest big blockbuster that tries to do something creative with the Santa Claus mythology. Violent Night (2022), which also depicted St. Nick as an action hero in the John McClane mode, was a smarter idea, although I preferred Red One to Fat Man, the movie a few years ago where Mel Gibson played a Santa who resisted becoming a defense contractor.