Terrorists have come to the North Pole, looking to kidnap Santa Claus, and the only man who can stop them is one of the biggest action stars in the world: Lee Majors, er, Dwayne Johnson. Indeed, Jake Kasdan’s Red One plays so unabashedly like a mega-budget remake of the Majors-starring Night the Reindeer Died made-for-TV movie featured in Richard Donner’s Scrooged that Amazon might owe Paramount Pictures a royalty check.
Kasdan and screenwriter Chris Morgan certainly commit to the bit, but there aren’t enough memorable moments here to make Red One a holiday classic. And, ultimately, what’s most surprising here is that the little that does stick stems from moments where the film is as serious as a heart attack about the most fantastical elements of its premise.
For his part, J.K. Simmons takes the part of a bafflingly swole workhorse of a Santa Claus and crushes it, playing him as a man of unwavering faith in the goodness of people, and the willingness to do his part to reward that faith. There’s even a bit of conceptual cool backing Santa up, with every member of a covert government unit, M.O.R.A. (Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority), hard at work providing extra security, surveillance, and air traffic control at his cloaked home base at an unusually Wakanda-like North Pole.
Elsewhere, Krampus is memorably portrayed as Santa’s deposed brother, a benign figure of chaos embracing his exile with a distinctly Eastern European cynicism and gallows humor. (His home is a fiery hearth populated with a grand menagerie of freaks and monsters that would make Guillermo del Toro proud.) Then there’s Gryla, a deep-cut character in Scandinavian folklore. A girlish, modern-seeming Kiernan Shipka doesn’t fully embody the bitterness and sense of purpose that fuels the character’s master plan, but the actress still brings an unsettling energy to the role that sets up Gryla’s creepy final form in the climax rather well.
The lion’s share of the film’s runtime is, sadly, just another Dwayne Johnson buddy cop movie, with the Rock doing double duty as Saint Nick’s stoic head of security, Callum Drift, and the straight man to Chris Evans’s Jack O’Malley, a scummy freelance hacker who inadvertently led the baddies to Santa’s doorstep. To answer the few, proud fans of Rise of the Guardians out there: No, Jack doesn’t turn out to be some iteration of Jack Frost or a trickster god of some sort. He’s just another in a long line of bad dads who have to learn a lesson about the power of family at Christmastime so he can be a better parent to his kid (Wesley Kimmel).
The boisterousness of Evans’s performance comes across, though his energy feels somewhat wasted on a character whose arc is obvious from the second he shows up on screen. As for Johnson, there almost isn’t a point to analyzing his character, as the actor is playing the same heroic, punchy mountain of a man that he’s portrayed in far too many family-friendly films over the past decade. In the end, Red One, isn’t egregiously terrible, as its trailers portended, but the film’s mild streak of eccentricity isn’t enough to elevate it. It’s neither naughty or nice, and in Santa’s book, that likely means it just ends up getting nothing this Christmas.
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