For a movie centred around the festive season and attempts to drive home the importance of joy, there’s very little on offer when it comes to the unnecessarily long 122 minutes of Red One.
Less outright bad than it is bland – which can often be worse – Jake Kasdan‘s potential-filled holiday actioner creates a fun world, but fails to inject it with much purpose or intention, leaving the family market likely to be scratching their head as to who this is exactly catered for.
Penned by Chris Morgan, who’s no stranger to the action genre, with a slew of the latter Fast & Furious sequels to his name (he’s responsible for number 3 through 8, as well as the Dwayne Johnson spin-off Hobbs & Shaw), Red One hits a lot of genre cliches throughout as the aforementioned Johnson’s hulking Callum Drift is on the cusp of retirement as Santa Claus’ bodyguard and sees this Christmas as his send-off. The chap doesn’t see the joy in Christmas anymore, but good ol’ Saint Nick (J.K. Simmons, considerably buff but underutilised) wants him to have more faith.
Of course, Santa getting kidnapped doesn’t help matters, and purely out of devotion to both he and Mrs. Clause (Bonnie Hunt), Callum sets off to find out who’s responsible, looking to perennial naughty lister Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) as the culprit. Jack was burned as a kid when he found out Santa wasn’t real, so as an adult he’s not buying what Callum is selling when he lets him in on the situation – it’s believed bounty hunter Jack inadvertently gave away the coordinates of the North Pole to the film’s villain – so, of course, we know that this scrooge will have his spirit reinvigorated by the time this is all wrapped up.
Of course, to get to that point we have to go through a variety of standard action sequences, overt CGI, Lucy Liu sadly having little to do as Callum’s boss, Kristofer Hivju and Kiernan Shipka making the most of their material as the hammy villains, Krampus and witch Gryla, respectively, and Jake reconnecting with his neglected son. It’s not like we haven’t seen a variety – if not all – of these story beats in other films before, but here there’s just such little effort exercised to even try and alter the familiar that it all just becomes a flush of predictability that isn’t even saved by its usually reliable, charm-heavy cast.
There’s a modicum of poignancy by the film’s end at least, and it’s all so inoffensive that the family crowd may find it easy viewing, even if the action, comedy and holiday aspects never quite sit cohesively with one another. Ultimately, Red One is sadly not the next Christmas classic in waiting, and its November release might even mean by the time Christmas comes around it’ll be forgotten, but in an uneventful week of cinema (i.e. before we have Gladiator and Wicked unleashed on our screens), it may find the crowd that would’ve happily lapped this up on Netflix and streamed it beyond recognition.
TWO STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Red One is screening in Australian theatres from November 7th, 2024.
