Red One is the latest attempt at making a Christmas classic but this big-budget studio flick is destined for the naughty list. Indeed a member of that list is Jack O’Malley, a pickpocket, code breaker type who we are introduced to breaking into a building to retrieve some information for a client whilst causing havoc in everyone’s way, even infants. He is the typical Grinch character who doesn’t believe – his younger self finds the hidden Christmas presents as a way to debunk Santa not being real. He is a cold-hearted and selfish schlub. Meanwhile, JK Simmons is Red, a Santa working in a mall, only he is the real deal. He has a core team behind him, Dwayne Johnson’s Cal is the retiring head of security for ELF (Enforcement, logistics and fortification) and Lucy Liu is the director of Christmas, which is a military-like operation run from the North Pole complex – a metropolis hidden from the world.
As the operation is preparing for its latest annual adventure Red gets kidnapped and with just a few days to Christmas, Lucy Liu’s Zoe has to hire Jack, the man who unknowingly helped the kidnappers break into the North Pole, to save Santa and likewise save Christmas. The journey is full of clichés such as Jack gaining a Christmas spirit by going on this voyage despite doing very little, or Cal learning to have more faith in humanity. Likewise, the film chucks at us pointless statistics such as the naughty list is up 22% year on year, and there are more naughty than nice, as a way to try and build stakes but in doing so forgets to ground itself in interesting characters. This is nothing that hasn’t been done before despite the whole idea being to play with stereotypes.
Red One is a drab and bleak affair. It is a Christmas action comedy only that I didn’t laugh once, the action is nonsensical and it is undoubtedly missing the Christmas spirit. The dialogue is ever on the nose, eye-rolling nonsense or gobbledygook exposition. Meanwhile, visually it looks like every other over-budgeted blockbuster, clean and without texture or personality. Produced by now Amazon subsidiary MGM, the film is made for the small screen, at best it is background music, but even then it's an eye sore.
The film’s director Jake Kasdan, whose father is Lawrence Kasdan, writer of The Empire Strikes Back amongst others, states explicitly in the marketing for the film that he wishes to use the film as a playground to break Christmas stereotypes. For instance, JK Simmons’s Santa is a gym lad, not the overweight pudgy figure more iconographic, but these shallow ideas go no further, nothing is interesting to say, unlike say Arthur Christmas, which takes the militarised North Pole idea as a way to juxtapose itself to Arthur who truly embodies the value of Christmas.
Dwayne Johnson delivers another one-note performance that is indifferent from the rest of his work. There is no personality to his work, no characterisation. Despite being in effect chief elf he does not embody the spirit of Christmas, in a performance that is way too serious that I was unable to switch off and try to at least enjoy the vapid nature of the plot. To be fair he isn’t helped by a poorly written character, who is a supposedly ageing elf who is reflecting that he is fed up with grown-ups, is that the best the script could come up with, and if so casting Johnson is only for a star name, something he is slowly losing with continual flops at the box office as audiences are slowly tiring from his empty and desultory performances.
Meanwhile, if Johnson had a visual style, this film would surely be it. It is green screen garbage that is poorly framed. It is a completely sanitised look that reflects the studio system of trying to make risk-free cinema. Everything looks as if it was shot on a sound stage adding to its complete lack of personality. The action is some of the worst shot I have seen, its handheld style is nauseating and its use of close-ups means that it is increasingly hard to see anything that is happening. Whilst a really odd score feels also out of place as if it is temp music laid on slap-dash in post-production, a particular shame as Henry Jackman has done some great work in terrible films, such as his magnificent score in the otherwise woeful Cherry.
Red One is a Santa Christmas film with hardly any Santa, stuck in a circular cell as the villain drains him of his magical power in an image that sums up the film. A completely draining experience that has no Christmas spirit. A studio film that has no risks, casting ‘bankable names’ such as Chris Evans and Dwayne Johnson only there to get a paycheck. The characters feel like they have barely met each other and there are no laughs, no thrill and most importantly no joy in this film that if I had to watch it again I would undoubtedly turn into a Grinch.
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