Review: 'Red One' is a Christmas action movie with no holiday cheer, overloaded with bad ideas and worse special effects
Dwayne Johnson always looks good in his movies, like chiseled granite — but the movies themselves, and the Christmas action movie “Red One” is as good an example as you’ll get, are more and more becoming bloated and immobile.
The idea that Johnson’s Seven Bucks Productions shingle and director Jake Kasdan (who helmed Johnson through two “Jumanji” movies) are going for here is a mix of jokey action and holiday cheer. What they get instead is a ton of undercooked computer-graphic effects, stock action characters and forced whimsy that is as fake as a plastic Christmas tree.
Johnson plays Callum Drift, commander of the E.L.F. Task Force, the North Pole entity that is essentially the Secret Service detail for Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons). Cal tells the boss, code named “Red One,” that he’s going to retire after this Christmas, because he’s not sure he’s up for the job any more.
Cal thinks the effort to bring Christmas to children around the world is falling behind, and that this year, for the first time, the naughty list is longer than the nice list. (Some pundit type is going to point to that line in relation to the results of this year’s presidential election and say Hollywood is pontificating again — and I’ll remind you that this movie was supposed to come out last year, before delays ballooned the budget to $250 million.)
Less than two days before Christmas Eve, there’s a security breach and Santa Claus is kidnapped. Callum checks in with Zoe (Lucy Liu), director of a global agency overseeing all mythological activity, to see if they can figure out how someone got through the North Pole’s defenses. Their only lead is a cyber-criminal, a sleazeball mercenary tracker named Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans).
Jack, as we establish in a freakishly unnecessary prologue flashback, has since boyhood known that Santa’s not real. In adulthood, he sells his expertise to the highest bidder, and squanders his money gambling. (How he affords his only-in-movies computer hacking set-up and still drives a broken-down SUV is a mystery the movie never attempts to solve.)
Zoe’s agency nabs Jack and drags him to the North Pole, where he’s confronted by both Callum and Callum’s lieutenant, Garcia — who’s a giant polar bear rendered in not particularly convincing CGI. Jack doesn’t know who hired him to find the secret to penetrating the North Pole’s security, but he knows who hired him. So now Callum and Jack have to become reluctant partners to follow the trail — because that’s how movies like this are supposed to go.
This might be fun if Johnson and Evans had anywhere to go with their characters. Johnson’s Callum is written as if the only instruction was “It’s the Rock, but in Christmas colors.” Evans’ Jack is a mishmash of action-movie cliches: The hungover lowlife who knows computer stuff, plus he’s a deadbeat dad to his son, Dylan (Wesley Kimmel, who’s Jimmy’s nephew). And together these two are going to discover the true spirit of Christmas, not because either of them feel it but because the movie will get a crappy CinemaScore rating without it.
There’s one scene stuck in my head that exemplifies this productions’ wastefulness. It’s when Callum realizes that Santa is in danger, and he’s sent his team to search every room in the complex. At one point, someone checks in from “mistletoe hydroponics.” And Kaadan shows us a guard in a room with plants hanging from trays on shelves lining the walls. They actually built a mistletoe hydroponics room, a space never referenced again in the film, all for a lame joke that could have been dispensed with a line on Callum’s radio.
The one part of “Red One” that doesn’t completely unravel, amid the bad special effects and lifeless narrative, is when Callum and Jack are in the lair of Krampus, the anti-Christmas demon (played by “Game of Thrones” actor Kristofer Hivju and a lot of prosthetic makeup) — and must play a face-slapping game with the master to escape. That scene has more humor, and genuine feeling, than the rest of “Red One” put together.
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‘Red One’
★1/2
Opens Friday, November 15, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for action, some violence, and language. Running time: 122 minutes.