Good news, everyone: Santa is real! The bad news: Santa is apparently so beset by constant mortal danger that he requires round-the-clock personal protection. That’s right, Santa has a team of burly supernatural bodyguards plus the paramilitary services of a secretive organization called MORA to keep him safe.
Safe from what? Well, not us ordinary mortals, that’s for certain — security at the North Pole seems pretty impenetrable to mere muggles, as far as we see in Red One. No, MORA is the acronym for “Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority,” and it’s their agents and paratroopers who are called in to assist when Santa is kidnapped 24 hours out from Christmas Eve.
So not only is Santa real, but so is probably every other folkloric being you’ve ever heard of (I’m not mentioning the ones name-checked here so as not to spoil, which is more than this movie deserves)… and one of them wants to harm Santa now, or at least quash Christmas, and plenty of them are up to no good on the regular (a sorry quip about “rounding up the usual suspects” gets tossed out). I mean, they have to be, because you don’t have 24/7/365 security for someone who isn’t a recurring target.
Wait, what?
I’ve said this before about movies that posit that Santa actually exists and actually does the whole Christmas Eve global prezzie blast while also giving us adults who try to convince kids that it isn’t their parents who leave gifts under the tree (as this one does): a world in which Santa isn’t fantasy would look very different from the world we live in. And no movie (including this one) has ever genuinely dealt with that, as far as I’m aware. But Red One is worse in this regard: it sketches a world in which dark supernatural forces are also in play and have authentic power. Never mind that some creepy old elf can see you when you sleeping and knows if you’ve been bad: he’s among the nicer of these magical entities. This would be a frightful, anxiety-inducing world to live in.
So, Red One is a horror movie, and it doesn’t even realize it.
But this movie is even naughtier than that. It thinks it’s a cute cheerful action comedy but it isn’t any of those things, either. At best, it’s a very copaganda Christmas — “Red One” is Santa’s security code-name, isn’t that cool? *massive eyeroll* *ACAB*. You know, for kids! It elevates Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s musclebound bodyguard to a holiday-saving hero, with a minor assist from Lucy Liu as the head of the military-adjacent, vaguely X-Files–esque MORA. (Spoiler: Not enough Liu here.) Johnson’s not-quite-human Callum is getting too old for this shit and is on his one-last-job with Santa before retiring — because you better believe that all the clichés are gettin’ rolled out — and he is forced to team up with Chris Evans’s Jack, a human hacker-tracker who inadvertently sold out Santa to the uncanny baddie after him, and now has been shanghaied into Old Saint Nick rescuing as well as, natch, being redeemed from his anti-merry cynicism.
But even the hackneyed redemption doesn’t really happen! (Though the movie somehow, bizarrely, seems to think it does.) Evans is apparently determined to squander all the cinematic good will he generated with his wholesome depiction of Captain America across a slew of Marvel movies, not to mention how he pulled off that chunky sweater in Knives Out, to stand around here screeching “What the [fudge]?” and “Holy [crap]!” and “Jesus [Cripes]!” (paraphrases all) as he encounters magical creature after mythical being that challenge his reality yet never seem to move him at all. If he ever learns the true meaning of Christmas, the lazy, inept script — by Fast & Furious veteran Chris Morgan and first-timer Hiram Garcia — is unable to articulate this. But he hugs his estranged teenaged son in the end, or some shit.
This movie cannot even pull off sloppy, kitschy sentimentality with any degree of competence.
But it’s not the worse thing here! The cast is, on paper, terrific, but Johnson (Free Guy, Jungle Cruise) and Evans (Don’t Look Up, Avengers: Endgame) have zero chemistry; this movie desperately needs reluctant-buddy comedy, and there’s none to be found here. The awesome J.K. Simmons(!) (21 Bridges, The Front Runner) plays Santa but, like the awesome Liu (The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Kung Fu Panda 2), he’s not in this anywhere near enough. And if you thought that the muscular Kris Kringle the movie posits — the Rock spots him at weightlifting! — might be in a good position to fight back against his kidnappers, well, yeah, that doesn’t happen either. Total waste of a great cast.
Red One is reported to have cost $250 million to produce, which is criminal, and definitely puts a whole slew of Hollywood execs on the naughty list. Director Jake Kasdan (Jumanji: The Next Level, Sex Tape) has overseen an uncharming, unjustifiable two-hour-plus runtime of anonymous bikini babes, crotch injuries, and other light festive violence unsuitable for either children or adults. Its fantasy world is visually roughed out in muddy CGI so ugly it looks like shitty AI (and maybe it is). To say this is not a new Christmas classic is putting it lightly. Red One is enough to turn the merriest Yuletide lover into a Scrooge. If this is Christmas, bring on January.
more films like this:
• Arthur Christmas [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK]
• Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Kanopy US | Mubi UK]
This feels like the sort of film that would have Santa in front of a bank of surveillance monitors, saying “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”.
How does a first-time scriptwriter get to work on a $230 million film? Well, Hiram Garcia is the brother of Dany, Mr Johnson’s ex-wife and (I think still) manager. But I’m sure they picked the best person for the job.
File under Christmas Horror that doesn’t know it, next to It’s a Wonderful Life (even death will not release you), I guess.
You obviously didn’t even pay much attention to the film. Your facts are off from point one. Nick’s equivalent of the Secret Service were the ELF, not MORA. In fact, the Mythological yadda yadda group refused to get involved because of their neutral status in such disputes between mythological figures.
I’m not suggesting it was a particularly good film. It’s absolutely mindless nonsense. But if you’re going to criticize a film, at least understand it first.
You obviously didn’t even pay much attention to my review. I clearly state that:
Spoiler: the “plus” there is the clue that Santa’s bodyguards and MORA are two separate entities.
But your lack of reading comprehension aside, even if your comment were 110% accurate and I had mixed up ELF and MORA, how would that have substantially — or even insubstantially — impacted my criticism of the movie?
A better question might be: Why are you stanning for a movie you consider “absolutely mindless nonsense”?
It’s obviously the story of God vs Satan with not so subtle Christian undertones and imagery. It’s the story of redemption and the forgiveness of sins. No wonder the critics hate it. This is a great movie.
Sure, clearly, there’s literally no movie in the history of cinema about redemption that critics have praised.
That’s sarcasm, by the way.
Would LOVE to hear your ideas on who is “redeemed” in this movie, what “sins” are depicted and how those sins are forgiven.