When you think of Christmas, you think of fighting for your life, whether that's with suitable gifts for children in your family or explosive altercations with your conservative relatives who end up saying the wrong thing after a few too many eggnogs. Bringing flying fists and people's elbows to the festivities is Red One, which is directed by Jake Kasdan and written by Chris Morgan from a story by Hiram Garcia. We meet Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), Santa Claus' (J.K. Simmons) head of security who must reluctantly hire and team up with Jack O'Malley (Chris Evans), an infamous hacker and a deadbeat dad, after someone kidnaps Santa a.k.a "Red One" in the North Pole on Christmas Eve. On the snowy road, as this mismatched duo tries to find the culprit and save Christmas, they encounter whimsical characters like evil snowmen, Krampus (Kristofer Hivju) and Grýla (Kiernan Shipka).
Looking at the big (moving) picture, Red One isn't trying to be much more than a simple, crowd-pleasing story about, as mentioned above, saving Christmas with some easily digestible lessons about working together to fix something and learning to be a little less self-absorbed. That's all well and nice since these kinds of films for the whole family rarely seek to shake the foundation but it's the packaging of said gift that feels rather haphazard. Kasdan and his collaborators are mixing fantasy, adventure, action and comedy with the holiday movie formula, but the problem is that aside from holiday shenanigans, it's not doing any of those genres particularly well. Even if the ingredients of the Christmas ham are unextraordinary, and we'll get to those below, Kasdan really should've steered the sleigh towards one of those genres more than others because the mash-up certainly isn't working.
Some of the fantasy touches are at least decent, including the CGI work for technically difficult creatures such as a talking polar bear and flying reindeer, and the design of Krampus where it looks like that there's a lot of outstanding practical FX makeup (which extends to background actors as well) in addition to possible CGI, plus Hivju is doing entertaining work underneath it all. The scenes involving Krampus and Hivju are actually easily the film's highlights; it's the rare instance when Red One really taps into the whimsy that the framework offers.
Other than that, the adventure isn't compelling due to a bland visual style—cinematographer Dan Mindel's lighting, Kasdan's staging, the rubbery VFX (supervised by Jerome Chen) and colour palettes aren't working in any sort of harmony—and the action often looks brutal in a bad way (for a $250 million production in particular), begging the question why we should care about any of it when your star can't even bother to, get this, show up to slide down a freaking pole. Most of the action is just mindless barrage of digital doubles or warped faces on stunt doubles flying across the screen. Worst of all, the script's idea of humour is having Evans shout some version "WHAT THE HELL?!" or repeat Johnson's previous line in a different font every three minutes. If you see this movie tagged as comedy, that's an evil witch playing a trick on you and you should start running.
One respectable thing regarding Kasdan's direction, though not a positive one, is that no one in his cast gives a bad performance that sticks out like a sore thumb. Everyone giving their bare minimum feels like a win because there are so many undercooked character arcs, such as Jack's unearned redemption at the end when it comes to his relationship with his son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel) or Callum's quest to form a festive superhero team in the hope of starting a new franchise under the watchful eye of Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu), the head of a mythological intelligence agency. There's just no spirit in the narrative whatsoever and the false sense of an epic it tries to sell to you can be pretty pathetic. You even get one of those faux blockbuster scores from composer Henry Jackman (or his army of assistants and protégés), which sounds like something you'd hear in a parodic trailer for a fake superhero movie. It's all so nonsensical.
Once the credits began rolling, I was ultimately just insanely disinterested just like many others will be, but even with that in mind, I've honestly been surprised afterwards that the movie hasn't felt offensive like some of these faux blockbusters tend to be. Some of the creatives and actors did an okay job and all the Krampus stuff was indeed delightful, so maybe that's enough to avoid the wasteland filled with truly awful movies. But it's certainly not a jolly occasion because the presentation is genuinely so damn bland and you will never think about the film ever again. 'Red Two', though? Now, that might be an offence worth a red card if it were to happen. Hopefully our own little Christmas miracle will be that a tasteless, CGI-driven mess will be the worst gift we receive.
Smileys: Makeup
Frowneys: Directing, humour
If they weren't able to retrieve Santa, the North Pole operation would surely be Clausing down.
2.0/5
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