Directed By Jake Kasdan

Starring – Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu

The Plot – After Santa Claus (J.K Simmons) (code name: Red One) is kidnapped, the North Pole’s Head of Security (Johnson) must team up with the world’s most infamous cyber hacker (Evans) in a globe-trotting, action-packed mission to save Christmas.

Rated PG-13 for action, some violence, and adult language.

RED ONE | Official Trailer (youtube.com)

POSITIVES

Even though ‘Red One’ basically turned out the way I expected, I can’t overlook a couple of soulful elements within its constructive outline that kept it from being downright insufferable, primarily the extensive world-building that feels like the single most fleshed out aspect of the entire script. While not the first film to take Santa Claus in a refreshingly deviated direction, there are some unique measures in the operation of his one night mission that I do commend for being clever, with magical elements being brought to life with child-like imagination, and mythical creatures of Nordic folklore being incorporated to the depths of the exploration. On the latter specifically, this might be the first film that I can remember that contains both Santa and Krampus, and though this is a star-studded affair, full of familiar faces committing themselves to the experience, it might just be Kristofer Hivju’s Krampus who downright steals the show for me, for feeling like the only actor who knew how silly this movie should’ve been. This seems like a good place to talk about those performances, as Johnson and Evans do surmise a bit of bonding camaraderie that is a delight to experience once they’re eventually placed alongside each other, and while neither are doing anything out of the realms of their conventional outlines, this doesn’t exactly feel like just another phoned-in paycheck opportunity for either of them, instead balancing the act with the kind of radiant charisma and rugged physicality that we expect from both of them. Lastly, the action set pieces, while feeling overproduced to the point of nausea, do entail with them an infectiously romping fun factor featuring a variety of unique locations and Christmas characters, to which there was no shortage of throughout the movie’s two hour run time. My personal favorite involves Johnson and Evans fighting a barrage of snowmen on a beach (You read that right), with rebuilding capabilities in the antagonist opposition that forced our dynamic duo to think quickly on their feet, as they dodged a barrage of snowballs and crashing waves that continuously shifted the balance of power between sides.

NEGATIVES

Unfortunately, as predicted, ‘Red One’ ends up on the naughty list, with a mixed bag of offenses that made this an annoying watch, even if not a truly awful one. The most detrimental of these is definitely a blandly derivative screenplay, full of predictable outlines so telegraphed in transparency that I feel like I’ve seen this film, even before actually seeing this film. It’s your basic buddy road trip movie involving all of the misunderstandings and bonding that one can expect, made worse by a complete lack of Christmas spirit that it reaches so heavily for, during the film’s climax, with a character transformation that it didn’t even come close towards feeling even remotely earned. If this isn’t enough, the comedic material, or lack there of, makes ‘Red One’ feel like a film that takes the material far too seriously, when in reality it’s a complete lack of effective gags that completely absolve it of an integral balance that doesn’t put too much pressure on either side of the tonal shift. It simply isn’t just that I didn’t laugh once throughout this movie, which is a fact in itself, but rather that the comedic material outside of the trailer gags are lazy and lackadaisical towards summoning even a credible setup that allows even the possibility of an effective payoff, resulting in stunted material that can never find the kind of unserious ridiculousness that it so heavily needs to accommodate this wacky world, without a connective tissue to child or adult audiences, whose only distinguishable link will be that they’re both bored endlessly by it. The arduous tonal shifts also showcase a sloppy lack of consistency on the part of creative, with nothing in the way natural growth or evolution for these characters that makes this film ever feel like the one that was advertised during the single most annoying trailer of the year. Being that Dwayne Johnson is attached to it, I can imagine there was a legitimate effort to tie this as closely to the kind of interchangeable slop that has made up the last decade of his career, and in the case of a story that takes place in and around the North Pole, with Santa Claus being kidnapped, it’s simply not the kind of direction that pays off a story meant to be intentionally wacky, instead offering Johnson no shortage of opportunity to mean mug for the camera, in order to show us that he’s a big, burly man who doesn’t shake vulnerably under any situation. ‘Red One’ is also a film that definitely could’ve used another cut inside of the editing room, as a two hour run time balloons as a result of an abundance of unnecessary characters and excessive arcs that immediately flatline the film’s pacing, somewhere around the half hour mark of the engagement. This is one of those examples of a movie that undoubtedly doesn’t need to be 120 minutes in order to capably tell its story, especially with a central arc that deserves a hell of a lot more urgency to the design of Johnson and Evans’ mission, to which it never finds in either a pursual of Nick Kroll as a shady investor, or a slapping match with Krampus that feels like it goes on forever. Then there’s everything wrong with utilizing Gryla as the movie’s central antagonist, who is not only underdeveloped in her correspondence to a time share with Johnson and Evans, but also tragically miscast, with 25-year-old petite actress Kiernan Shipka embodying her. I mentioned Kiernan’s shape because it looks downright silly every time she has to line up against Black Adam or Captain America, and while I don’t have a personal issue with Shipka’s acting, as I’ve seen very little from her to make a generalized assumption, I just feel she’s totally wrong for the role without an evil side that doesn’t correspond with cutesy, leaving her without a shred of imposing stature that feels compromising to our heroes, despite all of the magical powers in the world that could and should say otherwise. Finally, ‘Red One’ has made headlines for featuring a 250 million dollar budget that it will inevitably never earn back, and after seeing the film, it’s clear where a majority of that budget was spent. Bringing to life the fantastical imagination of the North Pole, this is a movie whose presentation is so cloaked in green-screen backdrops and artificiality that the scenes and sequences lacked a certain backdrop tangibility for their actors to engage with, made worse with the wooden designs to beastly creatures that grew all the more ridiculous by the minute. Part of the problem is certainly the lack of obscurity with the placement of the cameras at all time, which never seem interested or even capable of obscuring the visible outlines and textures that allude to a post-productive influence, but just as much visibility should’ve been paid to emotive facial registries of those beasts, which might as well be wearing a rubber latex mask to conjure the same kind of expressions that we ultimately get with such an inflated budget.

OVERALL
‘Red One’ is a limply lazy lump of coal that nobody asked for, made worse by a soulless shell that can’t even attain merit for prescribing the Christmas spirit. Despite innovative world-building and a stacked ensemble of committed actors to the imaginative silliness of the environments, the film crumbles under the weight of flat humor and oversaturated artificiality that ultimately condemn it to the naughty list of inferior Christmas movies with their heart in the wrong place.

My Grade: 4/10 or D-