Here’s what you need to know going into Red One: It’s a Christmas movie written by Chris Morgan – scribe of the third through seventh Fast & Furious movies (and the Hobbs & Shaw spinoff) – and directed by Jake Kasdan, director of the latest Jumanji movies (and one of my personal favorites, Zero Effect). The creative team backing them up is well-steeped in modern actioners, and the cast is composed of actors doing what they do best – i.e., be the muscleheads or slicksters that we know them to be. Does it do enough to differentiate itself from other feel-good Christmas movies, aside from using a gobsmacking amount of CGI? Not really. The plot will play out almost exactly the way you think it will, but at least you know what you’ve signed up for, and the cast and crew bear no pretense as to what this movie is.
Not only that, they know full well what they’re giving you, and this barefaced proposition is why I liked Red One more than not; expecting anything else from this film would be asking too much. I’m not going to kid you – this is a lark of an action picture that’s in one eye and out the other almost as soon as it’s over. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t have a good time – and show some surprising heart – while it slam-bangs its way through the theater screen. Seriously, Red One *is* fun. Just don’t expect a life-changing spectacle or a cinematic revelation, and you’re all set.
Kasdan calls upon Dwayne Johnson to pretty much be Dwayne Johnson in his role as Enforcement Logistics and Fortification (ELF – get it?) head commander Callum Drift, Santa “Nick” Claus’ (J. K. Simmons) no-nonsense head of security who’s guarded the jolly man for centuries. Johnson rises to the occasion, playing Drift as a cool-headed but tired man who’s seen the worst of humanity and isn’t feeling the job anymore. After years of watching people grow meaner and more self-serving, he doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble anymore and physically hands Santa his resignation letter. But when the need arises, Drift/Johnson flips the switch and goes into action hero mode, dispatching a wide variety of mooks and villains in his usual one-versus-plenty fashion.
Playing the loose cannon to Drift’s straight man is the ever-watchable Chris Evans, seen here as computer hacker and bounty hunter Jack O’Malley, a ne’er-do-well with a serious gambling problem and a job that doesn’t leave a lot of time to be with his son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel). Of course, he doesn’t have custody of Dylan; that falls to his Dylan’s mother Olivia (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) and her husband, people O’Malley knows can be better parents than he could ever dream of being. He knows he’s a slimeball and kind of revels in it, at one point jauntily stealing a lollipop from a stroller-bound kid while he walks away from his latest hack.
It’s this last job that brings O’Malley and Drift together, as this hack has produced the secret location of the famed North Pole, where Santa, Mrs. Claus (Bonnie Hunt), and scores of workers are some 48 hours away from their yearly Big Day. When the information gleaned is used to breach the North Pole’s shield and a squad of mercenaries kidnaps Santa, Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority (MORA) director Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu) and her team get right down to business, bringing O’Malley before Drift and charging both of them with Santa’s safe return.
Morgan doesn’t just go the usual route with this, instead engaging in some fascinating world-building that engages us immediately. We’re kicked around from New Jersey to the North Pole to Aruba to Germany via magical portals in toy stores (natch), and “supplies” – the toys picked up from these stores – are enlarged and made useful via Drift’s wrist gauntlet, capable of this and imbuing him with immense strength and abilities. He uses this to shrink himself to smaller sizes in order to escape enemies, get into places he ordinarily wouldn’t be able to fit, and – in one instance – “slap the shit out of” Krampus (Kristofer Hivju) in a game of Krampusschlap (a slap fight among supernatural creatures that would demolish regular humans).
Likewise, Santa’s entire operation is reliant on military and world government cooperation, and his absence is a calamity the likes of which would cause worldwide chaos. The way Harlow speaks of it, this is the closest thing you could have to the end of the world, at one point requiring a meeting with heads of state from all over to discuss the fallout of this kidnapping. The minions called upon to deter Drift and O’Malley’s investigation are literal snowmen, not easily destroyed by any normal means. And no one can even speak the villain’s name aloud, as it will literally call her attention straight to the location of anyone who does so.
But what’s really at stake here is the good in people. The aforementioned villain, Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), is out to punish everyone on the Naughty List (on which O’Malley is listed as a Level Four), and extracting Santa’s power is the only way to do it. Said Naughty List has grown to the size of a small U.S. state, as one character puts it, and Gryla wants to see to it that the world is run by only the noble. We’re shown examples of the kind of behavior that has caused the Naughty List to eclipse the Good List, from O’Malley himself to random passersby who think they’re the only people in the world who deserve what they want. Morgan has an axe to grind concerning personal responsibility, entitlement, and the shame of wrongs done that are never felt, and he takes all of it to task, brazenly dangling it in front of us but falling just short of being preachy. These moments are played for comedy, but the point is that we see these kinds of actions every day and it sucks not to be able to do something about it. And if we do, the person in question acts like they’re not the one in the wrong. (I might still be personally smarting from something that happened to me and my family at a Washington Capitals game just before I wrote this.)
Well, Gryla’s got her plan to do what no one wants to or is afraid to do, but that’s pushing it to an extreme, isn’t it? It’s the desecration of free will on a large scale, and even Santa and Drift know that’s not the way. But Drift’s weary soul speaks for all of us, as he can’t see the humanity that keeps us running anymore. Bad actors are lauded while the good go unrewarded; even O’Malley nets a big payday for what he’s done to kick everything off. However, both Drift and O’Malley find the good in each other, and from there, Red One takes a massive gamble on humanity and the pull toward the light. It’s an uneasy truce and trust has to be earned, and that’s not just between Drift and O’Malley; it’s the audience knowing what it’s in store for, that the film is asking us to go along with what it proposes, no matter how silly or trite its ambition might be. And if you place your trust in this movie, you may just tear up at the last scene like I did; like I said, Red One has a surprising heart, and you can’t fault a movie for having good intentions while having fun the way it wants.
