‘Red One’ review: Santa smackdown is everything that’s wrong with Hollywood moviemaking. Merry Christmas
“Red One” is a holiday fantasy built on the retribution, punishment and crushed hopes we deserve right now. It imagines a nightmarish mass-incarceration scenario put in motion by a Christmas witch seeking revenge on billions worldwide who’ve landed on Santa’s previously unenforced “naughty list.” Job one: abduct St. Nick, code name Red One (J.K. Simmons), suck the goodness out of him with expensive and mediocre digital effects, and leave him a lifeless shell of his former magical self.
Some films go wrong in postproduction. Some films go wrong in production. Some films go wrong before production, at various points where the script could’ve been saved. And some films, like “Red One,” start from a premise (producer Hiram Garcia gets a story credit here) that wasn’t right from the beginning.
Two worlds share the screen in “Red One,” one a realm of mythological legends, the other focused on selfish, thoughtless human beings in everyday life.
The well-known naughty list is up 22% from last year; people of all ages have lost touch with decency, kindness and basic humanity, enough so that Santa’s paramilitary security officer Callum Drift, played by Dwayne Johnson, has sunk into a funk that only retirement, he thinks, can solve. “There’s so much bad behavior out there, everywhere you look,” he says, flatly, to the glaringly buff Father Christmas played by Simmons. It’s as if Callum had spent every night of his life watching “Jingle All the Way,” which “Red One” manages to one-up in the depressing-mayhem department.
The Santa abduction wakes him up. With the reluctant aid of the sardonic yet jokeless hacker-tracker (Chris Evans) who sold info on Santa’s whereabouts to an unknown client, Callum embarks on a mission to save the man in red, and the holiday itself. Lucy Liu shows up here and there as North Pole chief of staff. The witch, a grinning sadist eager to confine billions of people inside their own personal snow globes for all eternity, is portrayed by Kiernan Shipka, Don Draper’s daughter on “Mad Men” once upon a time.
Johnson, seemingly an espresso or two shy of full engagement, likely knew he was in for it with this one. If there are classes in screenwriting taught decades from now, “Red One,” like Johnson’s earlier and similarly clunky star vehicle “Jungle Cruise,” will serve as warnings of a certain kind of effects-driven bombast. To the degree director Jake Kasdan had any tonal control on the project, his handling of the action steers away from humor; it’s just flying bodies, digital or not, and repetitive slapdowns wearing out their welcome after the first slap.
Somewhere in Germany, Callum and the hacker find themselves trapped in the dungeon of Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), where Callum’s forced to square off in a game of near-lethal smacks to the head. After what feels like an hour of screen time, Johnson mutters: “That guy just slapped the (expletive) out of me,” delivering a Will Smith Oscar night reference a year too late.
So how’s the spectacle? Well, the flying-souped-up-Santa’s-sleigh digital effects, featuring eight reindeer and their glowing antlers, do not suggest a movie made for an estimated $250 million. Even the beach scenes filmed in Hawaii don’t look like actual tropical anything; they’re lit poorly enough to recall some disposable Netflix rom-com. Screenwriter Chris Morgan wrote or co-wrote seven of the “Fast & Furious” movies, and brings the same pummeling gigantism of that franchise’s recent entries to this tale. In “Red One” he devotes a lot of time to repairing the broken relationship between Evans’ selfish dad and the isolated son (Wesley Kimmel, nephew of Jimmy) he barely knows. That plotline may well help put “Red One” over with undemanding audiences. Bad or good, naughty or nice, the industry needs hits right about now. It does not need a two-hour distress signal from a Hollywood that has lost its mojo.
———
'RED ONE'
1 star (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for action, some violence, and language)
Running time: 2:03
How to watch: In theaters Nov. 15
———