2024 | PG-13 | starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, J.K. Simmons, Lucy Liu, Kiernan Shipka, Bonnie Hunt | directed by Jake Kasdan | 2h 3m | 3 out of 5 stars |
I’m supposed to hate Jake Kasdan’s Red One, for any number of reasons we’re supposed to hate movies now. It’s too long, which it is at just a hair over 2 hours. It’s full of goofy CGI, which it also is though it doesn’t look bad at all. That it’s Chris Evans out of character (or back in his early 200s, pre-Captain America character) as a total jerk and it’s The Rock playing the same character he does in every movie. That it doesn’t fit into the increasingly slim parameters of what constitutes a Christmas Movie. The same plot-driven internet critic parameters that have ensnarled Die Hard every damn year. Whether or not something “is” or “isn’t” a Christmas movie is really not as important as if it’s a good Christmas movie. Nobody argues if Gremlins or The Long Kiss Goodnight or Lethal Weapon are Christmas movies. Red One isn’t particularly that good a Christmas movie. But it is a lively, inventive thing that manages to entertain and scratch a niche itch in the way of big budget action movie Christmas offerings.
Santa Clause (J.K. Simmons) has been kidnapped, forcing his head of security, Callum Drift – not a name – (Dwayne Johnson) to team up with middle-man hacker Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), who found him for the bad guys, in a race around the world to find him before Christmas Eve, exposing Jack to the international organization that manages mythical creatures.
Directed by Jake Kasdan, who has mastered this kind of big special effects movie with the two Jumanji films, Red One sits in a strange limbo outside of the defined demographics you market a film too. As critics, you sometimes also get bogged down by who in the heck a movie like this is for. It’s a fantastical fantasy about a ripped Santa Clause filled with scary monsters, cursing and PG-13 violence that would seem to turn off smaller kids. Less we forget in another era, movies like this were made by Jim Henson Studio. They were fantastical, starred kid heroes, were scary and violent. Now we’re so regimented out into having our viewing curated for us that it’s kind of refreshing to see a movie that does what it wants, misbegotten or not, throws itself out there and sees who it sticks with. Who is this movie for? The idea that kids like kid things and adults like adult things is a marketing idea. Adults still know about Santa Clause and remember fondly believing in this kind of magic as a child. Maybe all of those people.
Red One is occasionally clever but almost never subtle. We are introduced to adult O’Malley literally taking candy from a baby so you know he’s bad. I liked a lot of the world-building mythos around Santa Clause in this movie. It follows Arthur Christmas, Aardman’s modern Christmas classic that pushed Santa Clause into a modern age where he was magical but also a host of high-tech gadgets used to get the job done. In Arthur Christmas is elves repel into the houses like ninjas and scan kids to see if they are on the Nice list and then escape in Santa’s stealth spaceship. In Red One, per the title, Santa is treated like the President of the United States, given an escort out of the city by military jets and then arrives at a city cloaked under an invisible shield in the North Pole. O’Malley is taken into a military hanger by government goons (Lucy Liu, the head of them) and interrogated by a bipedal polar bear. We also get a fun scene where our heroes are attacked on a beach by bulked up snowmen who come out of the ocean in an ice cream truck and use iced snowflakes like throwing stars. There is a fun weirdness to all of it, even if I was also scratching my head at all the people that had to ok these decisions for a movie of this size.
Character motives on both sides are slim-to-none. The primary arc is given to Johnson, who’s on the eve of his resignation because he’s lost the magic. Evans doesn’t like Christmas and is the usual Christmas Movie Absentee Father, but doesn’t have any story point that justifies his convenient character turn. Then there is the Christmas Witch (Kiernan Shirpka, everywhere this year) who doesn’t just want to reward the Nice, but actively punish and imprison the Naughty – for reasons that are never touched upon. Kasdan skips through all of this to keep the pace moving, which works, but the movie is simply too busy and top-heavy. Cutting a few plot points (like Evans’ arc) and beefing up a few characters (like Shirpka’s motive) would have served the movie well.
Like Krampus before it, Red One seeks to redefine Christmas iconography for its own story: snow globes become traps, toy stores become world-wide portals. Kasdan however doesn’t take that next step to make the movie either particularly funny or exciting. Jumanji is funny and exciting. It balances the big budget CGI adventure with character laughs better than most Hollywood franchise films. But this isn’t the writers of Jumanji, it’s the writers of the Fast and the Furious movies – and therein lies the problem. It would have been a lot easier to go from Jumanji to Red One than to force a Christmas movie out of the Fast and Furious mold.
Everybody wants to make a Christmas movie because if you get it right you get something people will re-watch every year. I doubt Red One will make that cut, but there is a niche audience for this kind of thing. Adults who still like the fantasy escapism of the season.