With a few notable exceptions (Pain & Gain, The Rundown, Fast Five), Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s career has been defined by movies that resemble AI-generated parodies, although few have been quite as aggressively mediocre as Red One, which hits theaters Nov. 15.
A big-budget, CGI-heavy adventure that blends ’90s action clichés with corny Christmas humor, Jake Kasdan’s holiday extravaganza sounds like something cooked up by a committee or, more aptly, by the Saturday Night Live writer’s room. Imagining the North Pole as a glittering metropolis, St. Nick as a buff, benevolent soul, and his helpers as a collection of monsters and commandos, the latter led by Johnson as the bada-- tasked with saving his boss from danger, it’s a Yuletide misfire that lands like a lump of coal.
Though Red One is another blunder for the WWE legend, the blame doesn’t lie solely at his feet—his co-star Chris Evans also shoulders considerable responsibility for its by-the-books dullness. Evans is Jack O’Malley, a lifelong Santa skeptic whose two skills are finding anyone or anything that needs to be found, and being a smug, sarcastic, cynical d-----bag.
Content to operate on the wrong side of the law, Jack breaks into a geological facility, hacks its seismic activity servers, and provides his pilfered digital goods to an unknown client. Little does he know that the individual purchasing his merchandise is Grýla (Kiernan Shipka), a shape-shifting ogress witch who uses this intel to locate Santa’s frosty enclave, a winter wonderland of sparkling skyscrapers and glowing homes that’s hidden behind a camouflage dome—making it, for all intents and purposes, a Christmas-y version of Wakanda.
In this clandestine community, Santa (J.K. Simmons) resides with Mrs. Claus (Bonnie Hunt) and is protected by Callum Drift (Johnson), his bodyguard and the commander of E.L.F. (which stands for Enforcement, Logistics, and Fortification, making it an acronym of unbearable lameness). This is less cute than hokey, and so too are the many nuts and bolts of Kasdan’s scenario, including the fact that Santa is aided by a mythological creature-regulating agency run by Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu), and that Callum’s right-hand man is an anthropomorphic polar bear named Garcia (Renaldo Faberlie).
During a brief outing to a shopping mall so Santa can meet some adolescent admirers face-to-face, Callum admits that grown-ups’ selfishness and nastiness has sapped him of his Christmas spirit. With the Naughty List now longer than its nicer rival, he’s become disillusioned, and during a subsequent work-out session—during which Santa, aka “Red,” presses enormous weights and carbo-loads with cookies—he hands in his resignation letter.
Before Callum can quit on his centuries-old gig, however, Grýla infiltrates the North Pole and kidnaps Santa. How does she do this, given Kris Kringle’s immense magical strength? Red One doesn’t say, skipping over that crucial scene and barreling headfirst into a murky set piece in which Callum chases after Grýla, only to come up short. With 24 hours until Christmas, he and Zoe decide to locate the person who tipped the baddie off. When they snatch Jack, who’s renowned as “the Wolf” despite being a gambling-addict bum who sleeps in bathtubs, he immediately clashes with Callum, who has no patience for this “level four naughty-lister.” The feeling is mutual, thus establishing the film’s formulaic dramatic dynamic.
Jack is fated to turn over a new leaf and mend fences with his teenage son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel), just as that transformation is destined to restore Callum’s belief in humanity and the holidays. Along the way, Red One delivers ho-hum banter and a raft of equally listless details, be it Callum using a high-tech forearm device to turn toys real (such as a Hot Wheels car or Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots), or the duo traveling across the globe via portals located in toy store storage closets.
Callum and Jack’s investigation takes them first to Aruba, where they have a run-in with an underworld middleman (Nick Kroll) who becomes possessed by Grýla. Afterwards, they visit the spooky home of Santa’s estranged adopted brother Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), who doesn’t take kindly to their presence and squares off against Callum in a slap-fight contest.
Red One’s production design, make-up, and special effects are competent but flat, Kasdan frames everything as if he has both eyes on the film’s eventual television broadcast, and Chris Morgan’s script is full of wan platitudes about the child inside all of us.
While Shipka leaves an impression during her fleeting screen time, Grýla’s evil plot—to punish anyone who’s ever misbehaved with the aid of supernatural snow globes—is second-rate and snooze-worthy. Kasdan’s slam-bang skirmishes and chases aren’t any more interesting. Whether it’s Jack fending off apartment-building attackers in helter-skelter fashion, or Callum changing his physical size to take down three Armenian villains, the material’s adrenalized moments boast a distinctly sub-Marvel quality. The inclusion of a few minor (and wholly unnecessary) profanities merely further underlines the venture’s desire to appeal to a male tween demographic.
Every Johnson line reading seems tailored for a theatrical trailer, which is emblematic of a wannabe-blockbuster that keeps things frantic in order to mask its fundamental slenderness. It only takes one selfless act for Jack to gain Callum’s trust, after which they transform into heartfelt bros, and so many additional plot points are haphazardly introduced and/or tossed off that the film fails to establish a concrete fictional reality. Red One comes across as an insubstantial mash-up of various elements that have previously proven popular with audiences (or test groups), such that even Callum’s red-and-black leather jacket appears to have been made from the same material used for Spider-Man’s costume.
Johnson and Evans’ magnetism means that this seasonal spectacular never completely falls on its face, but that’s damning it with the faintest of praise, and by its midway point, its lethargy begins to grate and depress. All commotion and attitude and little inspiration or excitement, Red One is unlikely to ever achieve holiday-classic status. On the other hand, however, it may yet serve a valuable purpose on Christmas Eve: boring eager-to-stay-awake children to sleep.
