Dwayne Johnson’s Joyless Dud Is An Epic Christmess That Takes Itself Way Too Seriously

It might not be the holidays yet, but Amazon MGM want you to hang up your stockings early for Red One
, the high-concept caper starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, and JK Simmons. Johnson plays the role he was born for: a hulking head of security to Simmons’ Santa Claus, who is disillusioned with humanity’s lack of goodness, and one day from retirement.

Like Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, which Johnson collaborated on with Red One director Jake Kasdan, the festive adventure aims for action comedy. When Santa is kidnapped, Johnson’s inexplicably immortal Callum Drift teams up with Level 4 Naughty Lister Jack O’Malley (Evans), who is a master thief, hacker, and somehow has had the superpower of being able to find people or things since childhood. Don’t worry, that’s not really important enough to be explained beyond it helping the plot lurch forward.

Red One is a good analogy for a bad Christmas: it’s excessive, there are a few unwelcome guests, and it’s not really as fun as it looks from the outside. And I’m no Grinch: I am both an annual early-adopter of the festive spirit, and I have great affection for lots of Christmas movies – including some universally panned ones. I regularly watch Hallmark Christmas movies on purpose. But I’m sorry to say that Red One is a slog that lacks any of the charm that might have saved it.

The Things That Actually Work In Red One

Credit Where It’s Due, The Christmas Actioner Nails Spectacle And Lore

Frustratingly, Red One’s world building is very good and zoomed out a bit, there are things to enjoy. As with Jumanji, Jake Kasdan creates a rich mythology for this strange Christmas world, to the extent that you get the sense that it’s been drawn up as a Dungeons & Dragons world. In that respect, the director (and the wider creative team) deserves credit: there is some ingenious reframing of Christmas traditions that do feel like they’ve been carefully crafted.

The problem, though, is that Red One’s anchor to the real world – particularly in its Arthur Christmas-like insistence on explaining magic with ultra-modern technology – lets it down. That leads to a bit of an identity crisis that smarter hidden world movies like Harry Potter avoid by simply making the time setting vague. The double-world conceit is an interesting one that’s undone by both being too separated (by tone), and not separated enough (like Rowlings’ Wizarding World always felt).

That said, this part is supposed to be about the praise-worthy elements, and there will be criticism enough to come. The art design on show and the costume work – particularly the monsters and magical sets – is legitimately award-worthy. The sets are imaginative and impressively realized, the effects work mostly stands up, and if you’re looking for a movie that has a very high frequency of wire-assisted stuntmen being flung through the air, then Red One is for you.

Red One’s cast actually hides its best performance, which belongs to Kristofer Hivju as a new take on Krampus, which was genius casting. He plays the monster with just the right touch of his Game of Thrones character Tormund Giantsbane, a lacivious, hedonistic rogue, who loves chaos. That dark charm suits Hivju, even if he’s robbed of lots of his ability to emote by an impressive but very heavy full body prosthetic suit.

Who Is Red One For? I’m Not Sure It Actually Knows

There’s Something Of An Identity Crisis At Play Here

Red One’s most difficult demand of the audience is explaining who it’s actually for. Typically, I try to avoid this explicitly impacting my viewing experience and setting it aside for later, if it’s relevant, but I was sucked into the question repeatedly by the film’s preposterously wandering tone. There are moments that suggest Kasdan wanted to make something more adult, with jokes and subtle winks that are wholly inappropriate for kids, but then there’s also an obvious play to 10-year-old boys too.

In the end, I came to the Christmas epiphany that Red One is basically aimed at Fortnite players who wouldn’t be seen dead enjoying a typical Christmas film. The set-pieces play like disparate levels in a video game – a narrative style that actually worked for Jumanji (given, you know, the fact that it is a video game movie) – impressive in themselves but not really in service of the wider story. So while there’s a careful eye for spectacle, and an obvious embrace of the comic book movie style of film-making, it’s not wholly successful because someone seems to have forgotten to make it all fun.

I don’t begrudge the movie that budget – why should I? It’s not my money

That parallel to comic book movies is a pertinent one given the obvious cost on display. Red One was initially intended to be released on Amazon Prime, but delays thanks to Hollywood’s 2023 strikes and the apparent promise of early test scores led to a theatrical swerve. It does feel grand enough to be a theatrical movie too, because there are so many creative decisions that are drenched in money that it’s little wonder that the budget is reported as anywhere between $200m and $250m.

Unlike some ballooned budgets, you can see where all of that money went. Putting aside the undoubtedly costly lead cast, there is a massive amount of effects work, masses of prosthetics for multiple background characters, massive sets, and a commitment to wonder that I wish had translated into more emotional substance. As it is, I couldn’t help but feel the oppressive weight of the cost when entirely CG characters (like the polar bear used heavily in the marketing) fail to justify their inclusion at all.

I don’t begrudge the movie that budget – why should I? It’s not my money – but the excess doesn’t match the substance, and I wish more of the cost had gone into developing a story to match the production values, or a script with any memorable moments beyond The Rock saying “d*ckhead” once.

Red One’s Cast Is An Uneven Mix

Nobody Other Than Hivju Stands Out In This Particular Festive Spread

The Rock’s performance is curiously joyless, as if he took the character notes of a cynical, circumstantial grinch too literally. Annoyingly, there was lots of promise here. Red One is essentially a buddy cop movie, as already mentioned, but it’s so trope-aware and so riddled with clichés that it would have been better leaning into the meta-narrative, like Jumanji did. The Rock’s Cal would have worked wonderfully against Evans’ misfit if he was played like a Shane Black character, knowingly, comically stoic instead of accidentally bland.

That means certain setups that could have paid comic dividends, like Cal’s power to shrink at will during fight sequences, would have had more magic. Instead, you’re left wondering why everything is so miserably serious. That’s the case with the whole movie, frankly: it’s almost entirely devoid of feeling. The world view is cynical (by design), but then it sort of just forgets to make the necessary case for humanity before the point of no return. So, when the only flourish of poignancy arrives at the very end, it rings rather hollow.

Chris Evans does a good job of standing in for the audience, perpetually baffled at everything he encounters and a little lost at the story’s various developments. He does play a charismatic rogue quite well, even if his character feels like he’s playing dress-up as Ryan Reynolds, but the script lets him down badly. Most fatally, at no point does he really earn the emotional pivot at the end.

Elsewhere, there’s a very odd cameo by Nick Kroll, a fairly pointless supporting role for Bonnie Hunt as Mrs Claus, a bafflingly underused Lucy Liu, and Kiernan Shipka as the villain, Grýla, the Christmas witch, who the film attempts to gaslight you into believing is as big a part of collective Christmas consciousness as Krampus. She is not, and Shipka plays her like a Buffy villain of the week.

JK Simmons is a comparative success as the titular “Red One”: an athletic, gym bunny version of Santa Claus with more than a touch of big city hipster about him. He literally sits out a good portion of the movie, though, as the kidnap victim of Grýla’s army of personality-free goons, so that counts against him and the movie. Watching him magically deliver the presents is a rare spot of fun, admittedly.

Final Thoughts On Red One

The Snowman’s Not The Only Thing That’s Frosty

Where were the laughs? Where was the fun? A Christmas movie can get by on a lot less than most movies (as evidenced by the success of the likes of Netflix’s Christmas Chronicles), but Red One borders on being insipid. It’s like a big Christmas dinner designed by committee, but not actually cooked for flavor. There’s lots of bells and whistles, but in attempting to deconstruct and reconstruct Christmas spirit there’s just never enough charm to carry the spell.

Perhaps it’s true that Red One would have landed better on streaming? That might even be more true if it were releasing a month later, when festive spirit makes us all a bit more open to ridiculousness. But here and now, I’m left with the over-riding feeling that the movie’s early commentar on the commercialization and commodification of Christmas was a pretty chilling premonition.

Red One releases in theaters on Nov 13.