Red One – Review

Cert – 12, Run-time – 2 hours 3 minutes, Director – Jake Kasdan

Santa (J.K. Simmons) has been kidnapped, with 24 hours until Christmas, North Pole security chief Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson) must team up with expert tracker, and class-4-naughty-lister, Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) to find him.

There are many silly ideas within Red One. Not all fit into the serious-edged, 12-rated, globe-trotting action film that it wants to be. While a fight with giant snowmen in a beach resort might be amusing enough, despite some clichés and guessable moments, a prolonged slap-fight sequence with Krampus (Kristofer Hivju) becomes quite a slog. Largely, the rule appears to be when dealing with the central narrative and search for a kidnapped Santa (J.K. Simmons) the film works well enough, albeit with some stumbles and clunky ideas, when deviating or staying too long in one place things quickly become stale.

With just 24 hours to go until Christmas Santa (codename: Red One) is taken from the North Pole by the seriously labelled, Gryla, the Christmas witch (Kiernan Shipka) who plans to imprison everyone on the naughty list, with the help of Santa’s magical energy, to make the world a better place. While the film appears to be aware of the ridiculousness of Diet Thanos’ plot it chooses to take a step away from and ignore it, instead trying to focus on dramatic stakes and edges whilst only ever seeing the villain and her henchmen in brief glimpses.

Instead, we follow North Pole head of security Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson) who is lumped with expert tracker, and class-4-naughty-lister, Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) – the man who inadvertently gave away Santa’s co-ordinates in the first place. Of course, clashing with their different attitudes towards Christmas and life/ naughtiness in general – Jack is the reason Callum is resigning from his job, after a disheartening increase in naughty adults. The laughs attempted to be conjured from the arguments and back and forths between the pair rise infrequently, but few feel laboured and there’s the occasional chuckle. Nor is there a grating attitude towards either performance – if anything the central pairing make for a safe set of performances, Johnson plays his usual character while Evans sails through akin to most of his post-MCU roles. The dynamic between the pair is for Jack to question everything with a shocked exclamation of “what!?” followed by a frustrated, dead-pan explanation of yet another point from Callum.

For the most part there’s a quick-paced nature to the globe-trotting venture as the pair attempt to track down the buyer of the initial coordinates, and in turn the source he sent them to. The tone is likable with amusement scattered throughout, and the action manages to work when most direct – on occasion we see Drift shrink size to get around enemies before going back to simply kicking them between the legs (a go-to for him and the film, even towards bare snowmen, which early on begins to feel as if it’s not being done for a joke but simply a frequent tactic), an idea which doesn’t work from its first use, largely for looking strange and rather ugly.

Building towards the third act the arc of the narrative becomes sillier whilst director Jake Kasdan treats them with more seriousness. They clash and the closing events of the film, largely from a key turn of events and change in location, throw a dampener on the mild entertainment there’s to be found beforehand – perhaps a simple mild injection of festive spirit amongst the convention which makes up a key part of the film’s construction.

When better incorporating the fantastical elements and running with them to push the story along or properly involving them in a moment the film is at its best and moves along consistently, when it finds itself in a tangent there’s a tendency for it to become a rabbit hole as things begin to get lost in a moment with it taking a while for there to be a reason to leave the setting, and then that needing to be acted upon. During these moments a blander, at times boring, set of events unfolds, making the film fall flat in its big finale where it appears to throw everything it has together at once. Yet, this doesn’t mean that Red One is a complete disaster. It has its moments and manages to be an enjoyable enough, if safe and conventional, Christmas flick. It may not go down as a classic or anything intensely memorable, but for what it does it’s enjoyable enough festive fare.

At its bumpiest when treating sillier fantastical elements with straight seriousness, Red One has its bland moments and a good deal of convention, but it has some chuckles here and there and enough amusement to see it through as a likable festive flick.