Chris Evans and The Rock slog through streaming-grade holiday cheer in Red One

For a single sequence in the middle of Red One, a new Christmas-themed caper simultaneously aimed at all audiences and none at all, the movie snaps to life, as if jolting out of a narcotized haze. Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), a longtime security man for none other than Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) is on the trail of his kidnapped boss, and has recruited cynical, ill-behaved “naughty-lister” Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) to help him. Their shruggy “try asking this guy, I guess” quest has led them to the hidden land of Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), a fearsome creature with ties to Santa. Suddenly, the movie is awash in elaborate, practical-effects makeup jobs, with enough Christmas-adjacent beasts to fill, well, maybe not the famous cantina on Tatooine, but perhaps a more modest pub in a similar neighborhood. Jack, attempting to scam their way out of danger, gets Callum involved in a competitive slapping game. The slapstick is funny, taking advantage of Johnson’s ability to take a hit. The effects look neat, as if designed out of pure love of the form. There’s a bit of tangible atmosphere—some genuine movie magic, even, without nudging the audience to widen their eyes in wonder.

Before and after this sequence, Red One is a slog. Perhaps it was included as a way for director Jake Kasdan to issue a sideways, half-measure apology: Look, all you Zero Effect fans, that kind of movie is clearly dead and buried, but something as passably entertaining as those Jumanji movies isn’t off the table. More chilling, it seems possible that the filmmakers convinced themselves that the rest of the movie was more or less on this same level of good fun, perhaps because it’s not actively hateful.

Red One is, however, a distinctly joyless execution of a premise that’s supposed to overflow with imagination, the better to eventually overwhelm the degenerate tracker Jack, who, naturally, has a fractured relationship with his young son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel) that needs repairing. But the movie’s invention is largely in service of rebranding the North Pole as a cool, spy-like (or at least Spy Kids-like) operation that utilizes both enchantments and a staff of thousands to deliver presents every year; it’s a bit like asking kids and adults alike to rediscover the true meaning of Christmas by thinking about how great it would be if Red One parent company Amazon had access to ancient magiks.

The aggressively secular and gift-based systems of Red One are almost enough to prompt a moist-eyed holiday wish for more piously churchy seasonal entertainment. To its credit, the movie is largely about reconciling some of the odder points of various Santa Claus folklore—especially the concept of keeping track of who’s been good or bad, whatever that’s supposed to mean—with the open-heartedness more broadly associated with Christmas. It’s hard to fully appreciate this, though, when the mythological tinkering more cleanly connects to how even the movie’s whimsy seems focus-grouped and endlessly recalculated.

One of the movie’s magic-tech gimmicks is a gauntlet that allows Callum to change objects’ size (turning toy cars into real cars, etc.), and during fight scenes he uses it on himself to disorient his opponents. The sight of a pint-sized Rock zipping around makes it seem as if, at some point, the gag might have been that a physically imposing once-and-future wrestler is actually playing an elf. Maybe they realized that Elf got there 20 years earlier (minus the man-of-action angle)—or maybe “use computers to make a smaller Rock” was really the only inspiration behind these moments. There certainly isn’t much for his character as written; casting Johnson as a true believer only really works if allowing for a touch of mania behind his self-confidence. Callum is just another drab brand for the actor to synergize with.

As for Johnson’s normal-sized co-star: Is Chris Evans finishing up a Christmas Carol scenario, with streaming-company tragedies and nightmares like The Gray Man, Ghosted, and now Red One standing in for the spirits? Amazingly, Red One may be the best of his recent covert-ops trilogy, simply by virtue of not trying too hard to generate endless sarcastic zingers.

Instead, the movie’s would-be tween-friendly coolness rests on its Marvel-style production and costume design, which is to say it’s filled with colors that are dimmed and muted for no discernible reason other than to make a nonsensically “grounded” version of a futuristic North Pole cityscape. The combination of this expensive haze and a current-events cycle spotlighting serially unpunished behavior helps make a case for the movie’s fantastical winter-witch bad guy Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), who wants an even more punitive system of Christmas judgment in place—and looks fabulous in her harsh advocacy. Alas, everyone who made Red One is let off easy.

Director: Jake Kasdan
Writers: Chris Morgan
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, Kiernan Shipka, J.K. Simmons, Wesley Kimmel
Release date: November 15, 2024