Movie Review: 'Red One'

Red One

Directed by Jake Kasdan

Written by Chris Morgan

Starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Chris Evans, J.K Simmons, Lucy Liu, and Kiernan Shipka

Release Date November 15th, 2024

Published November 15th, 2024

Red One exists in the space between an eye roll and a groan. It’s an elderly screenplay that creaks with the tropes of a late 90s to early 2000s buddy comedy/action movies. It’s also a family Christmas movie so it’s forcefully benign, as such movies are when they are intended to live forever in the background of family gatherings playing on a loop on the Superstation or the USA Network. I understand if you assume that I hate Red One but I don’t. I can barely remember having experienced Red One. It’s a dim and dying memory mere hours after seeing it.

Red One stars Dwayne The Rock Johnson as Callum Drift, head of security for E.L.F, Santa Claus’ personal security team. They’re like the secret service but for Santa. Santa is played by J.K Simmons as a mischievous sort who likes to go to a mall in the days before Christmas to speak to kids as if he weren’t the real Santa Claus. It’s on these trips to the mall where Callum has begun to lose the magic of Christmas. Watching adults argue and bicker and steal and fight over gift items has taken a toll on Callum who has decided to resign as Santa’s top guy.

Meanwhile, in a coinciding plot, Jack ‘The Wolf’ O’Malley is a world class jerk who also happens to be a world class hacker for hire. His latest work involves him causing chaos so that he can break into a top secret facility and set up a hack. He’s selling this information to an unknown buyer who just happens to have a grudge against Santa Claus. The information that Jack sells to this anonymous buyer includes the actual location of Santa Claus in the North Pole. Jack doesn’t know this is the info he’s selling, he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus.

Naturally, his journey is going to be going from being a selfish jerk who literally takes candy from a baby in one sequence, to being a good person. To underline his arc, Jack has a son who has begun acting up at school and could end up landing on the ‘Naughty List.’ The Naughty List is real and serious business in this universe as mythical beings such as Gryla the Christmas Witch (Kiernan Shipka) and Santa’s own brother, Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), live to punish the naughty. In fact, this may be why one of them has kidnapped Santa Claus in order to use his magic to punish everyone on the naughty list all at once.

On the orders of Zoe (Lucy Liu), a government agent in charge of keeping the mythological and real worlds safe from each other, Callum is forced to team up with Jack to save Santa and, by extension, save Christmas. Of course, Callum and Jack could not be more different, if you can believe it. Callum is a straightlaced, uptight rule follower while Jack is a freewheeling rule breaker who tells it like it is. If you can’t detect the sarcasm in the last few sentences, I will help you, it’s a highly unoriginal pairing that feels about two decades out of date, at the least.

And that pretty much sums up everything about Red One. The film is deeply derivative and its creaky bones can be heard audibly groaning as the film struggles from one overly familiar, heavily CGI'ed, set up to the next. As for our leads, Dwayne The Rock Johnson appears to have forgotten how charming and funny he was capable of being. He’s not bad in Red One, he’s just muted, as if he doesn’t even know how to be charming. Chris Evans, on the other hand, decided that his character is from New Yawk and is defined by a forced accent. And that’s the extent of Evans’ acting in Red One. An accent.

The film is directed by Jake Kasdan and because he’s been doing this for many years, the film has a boring sort of competence that will convince many people that they’ve seen a not particularly terrible film. They’re not wrong, this isn’t an entirely terrible film. That would require Red One to be memorable in any way and I assure you, dear reader, it’s not. If it were not my task to write about Red One for money, I would have forgotten I’d ever seen the movie by the time I reached the parking lot of the movie theater.

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