Christmas movies are in a particularly weird place at the moment: There’s never been so much demand for the genre – so much so that multiple television channels devote themselves to it throughout December on a 24/7 basis, and every streaming service and major cable network has a seemingly endless supply of premieres each year (Hell, Hallmark owns the small towns they film their Lori Loughlin rom-coms in) – but the multiplex has proven to be a surprisingly hard nut to crack.
We can debate all day about what the reason for this is, whether it is oversaturation at home leading to indifference at the box office, the general decline that studio comedies have had in returns, or that there’s just too much competition from end-of-year tentpoles for them to really flourish unless it’s got the Grinch in it. Yet, I think the problem lies less with the audience or rival studio scheduling than with the movies themselves, which have seen a pivot towards action (perhaps to get the “Die Hard is a Christmas movie” crowd off of Reddit and into the theater) instead of comedy or drama, and my personal least-favorite development within the genre – logistics-informed concepts that seek to over-explain fables intended for children. Jake Kasdan’s Red One is another of these movies, and it’s a particularly irritating example.
The thought process behind these movies is innocent enough. What kid hasn’t wondered how Santa Claus can get to all of those houses in a single night or somehow manage to stack a sled with enough Squishmallows and PS5s to sate the whims of every child in the continental United States, or how he, a jealous god, can keep watch over them at all times and appropriately evaluate whether little Jimmy McCormick really had that swirlie coming to him because he stole your Twinkie right out of your lunchbox? However, when modern screenwriters get involved, everyone becomes George Lucas circa 1997, putting pen to paper with the idea that over-explained details like Midichlorians will settle nerd fights and provide some additional depth to things better left abstract. Add The Rock and a few hundred million dollars of Bezos company scrip, and you wind up with a movie like this, where the North Pole operates as a hybrid forward command center and Amazon warehouse, backed by the might of the US military and a secret organization that acts like the SCP Foundation if it were dedicated to ensuring the Easter Bunny’s carrots contained enough Ex-Lax to ensure the continued production of chocolate eggs. It’s a strangely dystopian vision but one in line with trends, given that most modern Christmas tales become vaguely scary when they try to make these fables practical.
Yet few go as far as to create a Secret Service for the fat man, played here by the anything-but-fat JK Simmons (who, to be fair, is always charming regardless of whether or not the film surrounding him is), which is led by Callum Drift (The Rock, once again forced to take on a protagonist with a name that feels procedurally-generated). As the head of the eye-roll-inducing ELF, Cal is Santa’s primary bodyman, making sure that his jaunts into the real world to sit on thrones at Philly malls go off without a hitch, that HR disputes between the elves are worked out and that the Wakanda-like forcefield that conceals the North Pole isn’t breached. In our introduction to him and the wider world of this winter wonderland, he succeeds at the first two, fending off a shit-head streamer from cutting in line and managing the concerns of an elf named Ribbons, and fails at the third. Somehow, a group of whiteout-suited commandos breaches the wall and, following a chase from the nigh-immortal Cal, spirits Santa away to an undisclosed location. His friends at MONA, a government organization headed by Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu,) only have a single lead: A bounty hunter/tracker/hacker named Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans).
Decades before his involvement in a mythological kidnapping way above his paygrade, Jack was the kind of shithead Boston kid who wanted to ensure that every one of his peers knew that Santa was bullshit because he was Too Real and Worldly, made smarter than all that childish shit ‘cause his dad went out to the packie for some Pall Malls and disappeared into greater Methuen. In the present day, he’s also a deadbeat dad and a gambling addict who takes on a job hacking into NOAA’s geological data arrays given to him by an anonymous client. Turns out that he supplied the information that led to Santa’s kidnapping, and so he gets involuntarily renditioned by MONA, where Zoe’s only barely able to keep Cal and an anthropomorphized polar bear named Garcia from an eggnog waterboarding session. Now, Jack’s not a true asshole – well, actually, he is, given that he’s high up on the naughty list – so he heads out with Cal to try and find the missing Mr. Claus, even though Cal fucking hates him. See, adults like Jack are the reason Cal wants to retire: The magic of Christmas usually makes it so the residents of the North Pole can see the joy within even the most bitter jerks, as represented by their inner child, and Cal can’t see that anymore.
Meanwhile, Santa’s trapped in a giant glass cage in some godforsaken part of the world, with his powers being sapped from him to mass-manufacture an Old Testament remedy to the problem of human sin. It seems you can’t bring joy to the hearts of a few billion children without making a few enemies, and the Christmas Witch Gryla (Kiernan Shipka) is the jagged counterpart to Santa’s good-natured holiday cheer. She’s a nineteen-foot-tall ogre who’s shapeshifted into Sally Draper, who was once involved with Claus’ adopted brother Krampus (Kristofer Hivju) but has now rejected everything the lawful good and chaotic good siblings stood for. Worst of all, she can be psychically summoned anywhere by someone simply uttering her name, which makes it hard when you’ve got a Boston dude who just says what he thinks in your crew. So, Cal and Jack have to figure out how to extract Santa from wherever he’s being kept, prevent Gryla from capturing the whole world in individually-sized snowballs, get Santa back on track for his deliveries, and learn the true meaning of Christmas, whatever the hell that is. But their main goal is to get you thinking about Prime shipping and how that kindness and charity shit is for suckers unless you’ve got a security force enforcing it. Plus, there’s all the spin-off potential with MONA!
Kasdan, who has made one unassailable modern classic in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (the pinnacle of Apatow-era comedy if you ask me), has become the patron saint of the surprisingly solid Rock vehicle, as illustrated by his work on the two Jumanji sequels. These were legitimately terrible ideas saved by some smart writing and amusing casting. Both became bona fide hits and put Kasdan in the Rock’s rotating stable of directors along with Jaume Collet-Serra and Rawson Marshall Thurber. Like Black Adam and Red Notice were for those two, this is Rock and Kasdan’s collaborative Waterloo, with the Wellington-like audience breaking their flanks with indifference. Kasdan bungles his responsibilities – the CGI work is shockingly bad for a movie this expensive (though there is nice practical VFX work, specifically for the Krampus), and the action is incomprehensible at times thanks to effect-obscuring lighting – and makes it a chore to sit through. Even when there are no supernatural slap fights or crazy chase sequences to be had, it’s impossible to find a real point of connection with any of the characters here, with Rock being seemingly anesthetized by Cal’s dissatisfaction with his life and Evans dropping his Rs in service of a role that lacks any of the charms, heelish or otherwise, that he’s brought to so many roles over the last decade. These talented leading men can make decent action comedies, and their efforts are wasted by producer protectionism, for which Rock only has himself to blame.
Still, the problem with a movie like Red One is that it sucks the magic out of the holidays by forcing it to conform to our expectations, both in the fantasy-action genre and for logistician nerds who can’t let sleeping reindeer lie. Traditional comedies have it much easier – The Santa Clause tempered this sort of stuff by, you know, having an everyman become Santa – but, oddly enough, even explicitly adult-oriented entertainment like Violent Night did a better job of preserving the high strangeness of the Santa idea even as it split skulls and killed dudes through chimney-descending magic. Red One, for whatever reason, sees it necessary for Santa to have a defense force and a fighter jet escort (and I get that this part is Rock and company trying to pay homage to those serving, but still, it’s just weirdly applied) when his nature should defy such a notion. To present that this “goodness” is a tangible asset that should be protected at all costs by the militaries of the world sort of defies the main notion of the fable: That, even in the bleakest time of year, a little magic makes it through to children unadulterated by the concerns of a grown-up world. This festive fiction is full of small kindnesses done by parents for their kids, with a certain degree of selflessness: Santa did it, not me. The pedants forget this when they apply logic here – it is not supposed to make sense, and the further it strays into reality, the less enchanting Santa becomes.
Like them, Kasdan and Rock mistake exposition for whimsy, and in the end, Red One is about as bleak as you’d expect from an Amazon Christmas special. Once it hits Prime Video, it’ll be something warehouse supervisors show to their pickers and packagers at the start of the Christmas season to ask, “Why can’t you gather those gifts as fast as Santa drops them off at the end of this movie?”