Director – Jake Kasdan, Screenplay – Chris Morgan, Story – Hiram Garcia, Producers – Dany Garcia, Hiram Garcia, Dwayne Johnson, Jake Kasdan, Melvin Mar & Chris Morgan, Photography – Dan Mindel, Music – Henry Jackman, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jerome Chen, Visual Effects – Rodeo FX (Supervisors – Julien Hery & Laurent Taillefer), Visual Effects/Animation – Rise | Visual Effects Studios & Sony Pictures Imageworks (Supervisor – Chuck Waegner), Special Effects Supervisor – J.D. Schwalm, Character Makeup – Joel Harlow, Production Design – Bill Brzeski. Production Company – Seven Bucks Productions/Chris Morgan Productions/Detective Shency Productions/Big Indie Pictures.
Cast
Dwayne Johnson (Callum Drift), Chris Evans (Jack O’Malley), J.K. Simmons (Nick), Lucy Liu (Zoe Harlow), Kiernan Shipka (Gryla), Kristoffer Hivju (Krampus), Bonnie Hunt (Mrs Claus), Mary Elizabeth Ellis (Olivia), Wesley Kimmel (Dylan O’Malley), Nick Kroll (Ted)
Plot
On Christmas Eve, an armed team break in through the forcefield that hides the North Pole from the rest of the world and abduct Santa Claus. Zoe Harlow, the director of M.O.R.A (the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority), snatches hacker Jack O’Malley. He is baffled what is going on until he is informed that he stole data for his clients that allowed them to locate where Santa’s base was. Jack offers a potential solution in tracking who his clients are. He is paired with Santa’s bodyguard Callum Drift and they head to Aruba to follow the trail of the gang responsible. This leads them to the witch Gryla, who is planning to usurp Christmas and imprison every naughty child.
dIt used to be that fairly much every second December season or so, we would get some theatrically released Christmas-themed film. These have ranged from the likes of Miracle on 34th Street (1947) to Santa Claus – The Movie (1985) and mostly comedy treatments like The Santa Clause (1994), Elf (2003) and more recently Candy Cane Lane (2023), in between a large number of adaptations of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843). These days most Christmas-themed films are made for tv, a niche that has become so prolific and saccharine that I make no effort to keep up with them. That’s also not counting a growing body of Christmas horror movies. (For a more detailed overview see Christmas Films).
Amid these Christmas fantasies, there have been a spate of films dealing with the idea of Santa operating with real world restraints – Santa trying to find a wife as in The Santa Clause 2 (2004) or having a brother in Fred Claus (2007) and various films with his children inheriting the role, even of Santa being evicted from the North Pole as in The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t (1966). I had quite a liking for the recent Fatman (2020) with Mel Gibson as a Santa trying to run the North Pole as a business amid modern market forces and dealing with a kid who has hired a hitman.
Red One is more like an ungainly concoction of people sitting around a boardroom throwing every idea they had into the mix than it is a film – it has been composed in terms of its star power; it’s an unwieldly crosshatch of a Christmas film and an Action Film; it wants to be something of Rise of the Guardians (2012) with its extended world of other mythological creatures. And none of it much works.
(l to r) Chris Evans and Dwayne Johnson
Somewhere along the line the conception for Red One must have been the idea of it as ‘Christmas – The Action Movie’. It may help to explain things when you learn that writer/co-producer Chris Morgan has written seven of the The Fast and the Furious films, as well as produced a number of them. It makes more sense trying to perceive Red One in the same vein as an action movie of The Fast and the Furious variety than it does as a traditional Christmas Film.
Thus Dwayne Johnson, another fixture of The Fast and the Furious films, is cast in humourless tough guy mode. He tells us that he belongs to an organisation called E.L.F. (which stands for Enforcement, Logistics and Fortification), presumably because playing an elf was something too wussy for a tough guy like The Rock. (Mindedly, Johnson did once make an entire film where he played a fairy with Tooth Fairy (2010) – and outfitted in a pink tutu). Chris Evans, Captain America himself, is cast in the familiar trope of the bumbling, cowardly and occasionally street-smart sidekick, who gets an easy, predictable redemption arc (he asks forgiveness and promises to be less neglectful to his kid). Johnson and Evans are cast in one of those constantly bickering relationships that you inevitably know will amount to a thawing of ways and friendship by the end of the film.
As might be expected from Morgan’s Fast and the Furious scripts, Red One is filled with absurd, frequently physics defying action sequences of the sort that we only get in well The Fast and the Furious films – a high-speed snowmobile chase through the North Pole that involves Dwayne Johnson conducting a fifty plus foot dive over a cliff to emerge not even ruffled. In another scene, loser hacker Chris Evans displays world-class fighting skills when it comes to defeating an armed North Pole security detachment come to apprehend him.
Dwayne Johnson faces Krampus in the Krampus Schlapp contest
There are also sequences that seem as though they belong more in an MCU-styled film with Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans fighting against snowmen brought to life in Aruba (the snowmen are finally defeated by having the carrots pulled out of their noses) and the climactic scenes taking on the giant monstrous form of Gryla. And there are other parts of the film – Dwayne Johnson using a device that turns toys into high-end sports cars and robots, and the Krampus Schlapp sequence (a tradition invented for the film) where Dwayne Johnson and Krampus engage in a face-slapping contest – that seem ones that you can think only would have worked in a children’s film. It really is a film with an identity crisis about what it wants to be.
Probably the most ridiculous and ill-considered aspect of Red One is the scenes with J.K. Simmons’ Santa shown pumping weights. The idea of the muscular tough guy Santa seems just so far away from the jolly fat man we get in any traditional portrayal that your mind goes “What were they thinking?” Equally, Kiernan Shipka as the witch Gryla seems a casting choice made more of an agent’s deal than someone right for the part – Shipka came to attention as a child actor in tv’s Mad Men (2007-15) and then as the title character in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2021-2). Here rather than filling the screen with large-than-life evil and scenery-chewing acting as is mandatory for this type of role, Shipka looks all of about eighteen and seems to struggle to fill the role.
Director Jake Kasdan is the son of director-writer Lawrence Kasdan, known for his screenplays for The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and as director of films like The Big Chill (1983), Silverado (1985) and Dreamcatcher (2003). Jake has maintained a modest career as a director of mainstream comedies with the likes of Zero Effect (1998), Orange County (2002), Bad Teacher (2011) and Sex Tape (2014), as well as wrote the script for Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007). He most recently has the reasonable hit of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) and its sequel Jumanji: The Next Level (2019), which also starred Dwayne Johnson.
