Red One: Dwayne Johnson’s soulless flick wasn’t on anyone’s Christmas list
Father Christmas is real and Lapland’s a production line? Let’s agree, this premise is no fun any more: it’s the moth-eaten basis of Christmas flicks with no fresh ideas. At least 2022’s Spirited, starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds, switched tack to the ghosts haunting Scrooge.
No such luck with Red One. This plodding caper could very easily have cast Ferrell as the hero elf (again) and Reynolds as the cynical hacker/bounty hunter (of course) who team up to rescue Santa Claus. Getting Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans is neither an upgrade nor a downgrade: if the script was better or the whole film didn’t look like a death metal rave in an aircraft hangar it might have matched Spirited’s modest enjoyment value.
But this $250 million production, which was delayed by the strikes last year and reportedly by Johnson’s chronic tardiness during filming (he was allegedly late an average of seven to eight hours a day although Amazon has refuted this), is not an achievement to boost the decent batting average of director Jake Kasdan (Zero Effect, the recent Jumanji films).
It doesn’t stand the slightest chance of warming anyone’s cockles. It’s cold and grim – an effects-laden action romp with jingle bells tied on. Santa (JK Simmons, wasted) is kidnapped by a baby-faced Icelandic ogress known as the “Christmas witch”, which means that Johnson’s humourless elven security chief is forced to hire the services of Evans’s Jack O’Malley, who gets non-consensually whisked to the North Pole and has his mind duly blown.
Who’s it all for? Too violent for under-12s, too corny for teens, it dreams of a Hunger Games demographic, while also dropping weirdly bitter nods to the video games kids prefer in their stockings. By implication, you’re headed for the naughty list if you aren’t inexplicably rooting for these multiplex icons to “save Christmas”, simply so that everyone gets their swag on time.
The emotional undertow is so token it’s an insult. Evans bonds with his disaffected son (Wesley Kimmel, nephew of Jimmy) while we yawn and eye the exit. This whole story pimps out Yuletide as a strictly mercantile fixture, with a sham veneer of goodwill merely sweetening the transaction.
As the kicker, it has a lengthy set piece in the lair of Santa’s resentful, horned sibling Krampus (Kristofer Hivju) where he and Johnson set about ritually slapping one another. What this homage to the Will Smith Oscars slap has to do with Christmas-saving is not something the screenplay bothers to answer.
High-tech and low-charm, this is the sort of film you make to fund an extension, or buy a fleet of unwanted drones for your whole family.
12A cert, 123 min. In cinemas now