‘Red One’ Review: Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans in a Holiday Action Fantasy That Gives Christmas a Backstory It Didn’t Need
Here’s the bad joke of Hollywood Christmas movies. They tend to begin, and end, with a blast of old-school Yuletide cheer. But that’s just a tease. In between, most of them make a point of straying about as far from the Christmas spirit as possible. Instead, they swap in the new American spirit: vulgar, violent, full of fake fun, celebrating their own crassness. To trace the genesis of the anti-Christmas Christmas movie (“Jingle All the Way,” “Violent Night”), you would probably have to go back to a couple of movies that are thought of as classics (though not by me): “A Christmas Story” and “Home Alone,” both of them glasses of eggnog spiked with misanthropy.
That said, I’m not sure that a Hollywood movie has ever kicked off the season with less true Christmas spirit than “Red One.” Sure, J.K. Simmons plays Santa Claus (who gets abducted), and Simmons is winning in his crinkly old wise innocence. Dwayne Johnson, as Santa’s bodyguard (who wants to retire because he’s having a crisis of faith), is his outsize amiable self. The odd thing about the movie is that while it’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek, it’s not really a comedy. Directed with charmless energy by Jake Kasdan, “Red One” is at once an action movie; a kidnap-rescue thriller in which the doors to supply closets in toy stores are mystic portals; and an exercise in Christmas world-building, as if that’s the thing that’s been missing from Christmas.
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At the beginning, Simmons’ Santa is seated on his throne, greeting a line of children in a shopping mall, a location he finds to be the most soulful place on earth (which shows you how far we’ve come from “Jingle All the Way” — even Santa now digs the capitalism of it all!). The hot toy of the season, the one kids keep asking him for, is a video game called Vampire Assassin 4. We’re supposed to chuckle at how un-Christmas-sounding that is. But “Red One” could almost be the movie version of Vampire Assassin 4. It’s that busy and bumptious, that overstuffed with cheesy digital effects, that generically derivative a piece of violent kitsch.
The film’s first not-quite-trying-to-be-funny “joke” is that Santa Claus’s whole enterprise is run like a U.S. military operation. Santa’s code name is Red One. Johnson’s Cal works for ELF -— which stands for Enforcement Logistical Fortification, and means that Cal darts around like a secret-service agent, barking orders into his wrist walkie-talkie. CF drones, Sno-Cats, a cargo plane: the film is light on tinsel but heavy on equipment. And the dialogue is tech-bombastic enough to sound like something out of a Dan Aykroyd comedy from 1986.
It is also — of course — a buddy movie. No, not Santa and his bodyguard. (Once Santa is kidnapped, which happens early on, he’s mostly out of the picture.) The buddies here, who start off hating each other, are Cal, who’s been tasked with hunting down Santa’s whereabouts, and Jack (Chris Evans), a degenerate sports gambler and derelict divorced dad who is also some sort of super-hacker. Disreputable powers from all over the globe hire him, through encrypted communications, to uncover the hidden location of people and things, which he does with effortless dash.
It was Jack’s handiwork that revealed Santa’s precise location in the North Pole (under a dome, it’s sort of like the Christmas-store version of the Pentagon). And that’s what allowed Santa to be kidnapped by Gryla, an ancient witch played by the always-welcome Kiernan Shipka, who ever since “Mad Men” I’ve thought (and still think) is going to be a major star — and this movie, in its blunderbuss way, shows why. Gryla is a standard nuance-free glowering nemesis, like something out of a “National Treasure” sequel. Yet the way Shipka plays her, there’s a tingle to her anger. Her evil dream? To punish everyone on Santa’s naughty list.
We meet Santa’s reindeer, who are interchangeable oversize digital creations, referred to as “girls.” Why would the reindeer be so tall? And why would they all be female? This is the sort of “whatever” conceit that dots “Red One.” Cal and Jack start off in Aruba, just because. On the beach, Cal, amusingly, changes size during a fight, and the two have to fend off an attack by ferocious snowmen. But that’s just one pit stop. They wind up in Germany in a medieval “Star Wars” cantina trying to save themselves from Santa’s estranged brother, the giant goat-man troll Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), at which point you’re either onboard or (in my case) starting to check your watch.
The villains are shape-shifters, but the key thing about “Red One” is that the whole movie is a shape-shifter: arduous action jape, low-kitsch Christmas fairy tale, buddy movie, family-reconciliation movie — every quadrant and demo must be served. At the movies, Christmas isn’t a holiday anymore, it’s a concept to be retro-fitted. Do you hear those sleigh bells jingling? Come on, it’s lovely weather for an over-the-top-of-the-North-Pole, through-the-supply-closet-portal, cargo-plane ride together with you.
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