Good news, everyone: Santa is real! The bad news: Santa is apparently so beset by constant mortal danger that he requires round-the-clock personal protection. That's right, Santa has a team of burly supernatural bodyguards plus the paramilitary services of a secretive organization called the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority to keep him safe.
Safe from what? Well, not us ordinary mortals, that's for certain — security at the North Pole seems pretty impenetrable to mere muggles, as far as we see in Red One. But MORA's agents and paratroopers are called in to assist when Santa is kidnapped 24 hours out from Christmas Eve.
So not only is Santa real, but so is probably every other folkloric being you've ever heard of (I'm not mentioning the ones name-checked in the movie to avoid spoilers)... and one of them wants to harm Santa, or at least quash Christmas. And plenty of the others are up to no good on the regular. After all, you don't have 24/7/365 security for someone who isn't a recurring target.
In this world, a creepy old elf who can see you when you're sleeping and knows if you've been bad is among the nicer of the magical entities.
Red One is a horror movie, and it doesn't even realize it.
But this movie is even naughtier than that. It thinks it's a cute cheerful action comedy, but it isn't any of those things, either. At best, it's a very copaganda Christmas that elevates Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's musclebound bodyguard to a holiday-saving hero with a minor assist from the underutilized Lucy Liu as the head of the military-adjacent, vaguely X-Files–esque MORA. Johnson's not-quite-human Callum is getting too old for this shit and is on his one-last-job with Santa before retiring. He is forced to team up with Chris Evans' Jack, a human hacker/tracker who inadvertently sold out Santa to the baddie. Jack gets shanghaied into Old Saint Nick rescuing, which one would naturally think would redeem his general anti-merry cynicism.
But even the redemption doesn't really happen! Evans is apparently determined to squander all the cinematic good will he generated with his wholesome depiction of Captain America across a slew of Marvel movies and his chunky sweater fits in Knives Out. In Red One he just stands around screeching "What the [fudge]?" and "Holy [crap]!" and "Jesus [Cripes]!" (paraphrases all) as he encounters magical creature after mythical being that challenge his reality yet never seem to move him at all. If he ever learns the true meaning of Christmas, the lazy, inept script by Fast & Furious veteran Chris Morgan and first-timer Hiram Garcia is unable to articulate it.
This movie cannot even do sloppy, sappy sentimentality with any degree of competence.
But it's not the worse thing here! The cast is — on paper — terrific, but Johnson and Evans have zero chemistry. This movie desperately needs reluctant-buddy comedy, and there's none to be found. J.K. Simmons plays Santa, but, like Liu, he's not in this anywhere near enough. And if you thought that the muscular Kris Kringle the movie posits — the Rock spots him at weightlifting! — might be in a good position to fight back against his kidnappers... well... yeah... that doesn't happen either. Total waste of a great cast.
Red One is reported to have cost $250 million to produce, which is criminal, and definitely puts a whole slew of Hollywood execs on the naughty list. Director Jake Kasdan has overseen an uncharming, unjustifiable two-hour-plus runtime of anonymous bikini babes, crotch injuries, and other light festive violence unsuitable for either children or adults. Its fantasy world is visually roughed out in muddy CGI so ugly it looks like shitty AI (and maybe it is). To say this is not a new Christmas classic is putting it lightly. Red One is enough to turn the merriest Yuletide lover into a Scrooge. If this is Christmas, bring on January.
Red One
