Review: ‘Red One’s overambition will leave you feeling cold this Christmas

Once again, it’s clear that Dwayne Johnson is right at home with being typecast. While he may be surrounded by the larger-than-life fictional personalities that make the holidays great, Red One is yet another avenue to showcase Johnson’s colossal physicality. Some softness does manifest during the movie’s lengthy two-hour runtime, but this feat is largely attributed to his pairing with Chris Evans.

In Red One, Santa Claus (or at least a jacked-up version of him played by J.K. Simmons) has been kidnapped on Christmas Eve. Now, it’s up to the head of the North Pole’s security team (Dwayne Johnson) to bring him back and save Christmas. To accomplish this, he teams up with an infamous hacker named Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans). Topping off the cast are: Lucy Liu, Kiernan Shipka, Kristofer Hivju, and Nick Kroll. 

As the buzz for Red One began to increase, social media couldn’t help but notice the film’s alarmingly high budget of almost $250 million. For such a massive sum, you’d expect fireworks. But Red One suffers from only providing short bursts of action and no emotional investment in anything that’s happening. The blame game will have you pointing to Dwayne Johnson, due to a previously established sense of grandiosity, but Jake Kasdan’s direction is also not helping matters.

The pacing is not only erratic, but it aims for eye-catching moments rather than anything meaningful. While this succeeds in awarding the audience with slick action sequences, these eye-candy scenes quickly evaporate into nothingness and don’t move the story forward. Altogether, Red One is completely unsure of what it wants to be. Through forced humor, which undermines the tension, and chains of activities devoid of emotional payoff, Red One, is simply unrewarding.

Strangely enough, Johnson’s charisma, his saving grace as an actor, is largely missing from his performance. Evans, for his part, delivers much of what you’d expect from a former comedic actor. While his time in the MCU saw him move past his comedy film catalog, Red One reminds the audience of how great his timing is. Thankfully, his lighter energy rubs off on Johnson, resulting in Red One‘s funniest moments.

On the topic of the film’s outrageous budget, which rivals some of the best superhero movies ever released, there is no excuse. Red One could have been made with half of this amount, which begs the question of the delusions of grandeur that possessed the suits and ties to greenlight the project. There’s too much happening in the movie, and simultaneously, nothing is happening. Between the fairly predictable twists, the jokes have a hard time landing, and the CGI becomes unbearable after a while. The over-reliance on visual effects takes away any kind of groundedness from the film, and distracts from an obvious lack of substance, or any kind of character development.

But beyond all the displays, fight scenes, and a swole J.K. Simmons, Red One’s strong suit, and possibly its redeeming quality, is its mindlessness. This is a movie that was made, not to teach any lessons, but to distract you from everyday life, using CGI explosions, a talking polar bear, and a power slap competition. The best way to experience Red One is to go in with rock bottom expectations, and just enjoy the extravaganza of it all. After all, in case you forgot, it cost a staggering quarter of a billion dollars to make.

Unfortunately, for those in search of holiday magic, Red One isn’t a good choice. The film lacks Christmas charm, and substitutes warm feelings for cold-hearted action. Coupled with a generic plot with no room for surprises, it’s something that, at best, is a mild distraction.