I was hoping that Red One director Jake Kasdan might do for the soulless, overstuffed, CGI-driven Christmas movie (I’m looking at you, 2000’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas) what he did for the tortured-artist biopic with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007). Instead, Red One answers the question: What if there were a Fast and Furious Christmas movie?
Chris Morgan, who wrote seven entries in the unbrakeable franchise, fills Red One with car chases and CGI fight scenes galore, plus of course heavy-handed talk about family. There is also gratuitous profanity that is as killing to the holiday spirit as the human behavior that has disillusioned Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), who means to retire after more than 500 years on the job as Santa Claus’s head of security. For the first time, he ruefully notes, there are more people on the naughty list than the nice list. But before Cal can make that proverbial last run with code-named Red One, Santa is kidnapped by Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), a shape-shifting witch out to punish the world’s naughty by encasing them in snow globes. Cal is forced to team up with Jack (Chris Evans), an amoral tracker who inadvertently opened the door for Santa’s abduction. Not believing in Santa as a child was his gateway to the naughty list. He is a degenerate gambler and a deadbeat and neglectful dad. “I’m not going to like you, am I?” Jack asks of Cal when they meet. Well, we know how that’s going to go.
With all its North Pole mayhem, Red One plays like a feature-length version of The Night the Reindeer Died, the Christmas movie spoof that kicked off Scrooged (1988). But that was satire, and Red One isn’t kidding. What keeps Red One from being a total, well, brown one is its collateral pleasures: J.K. Simmons’s uncynical and jacked Santa (you’ve got to be in shape for those yearly one-night treks around the world); the criminally underutilized Bonnie Hunt as his wife; Nick Kroll as a middleman in the whole kidnap-Santa plot; and Kristofer Hivju as Santa’s estranged brother Krampus, as fine a character creation as Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, although a side trip to his castle pads the movie to its more than two-hour runtime. One fleeting moment that involves Cal’s disillusionment that he can no longer see naughty adults’ inner children did get me, and it makes one wish there were more such moments. This is a Christmas film, after all. PG-13, 123 min.
Wide release in theaters
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