Red One (dir. Jake Kasdan)

By: Adam Freed

There is a small but dedicated faction of people who treat November 1st like the first day of the Christmas season.  No sooner has the last jack-o-lantern been sent to its final resting place, than the warm glow of Griswoldian holiday lights illuminate the November night sky.  While the premature yuletide enthusiasm of these individuals comes from a pure place, it also feels rather forced.  Director Jake Kasdan (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) is likely one of these people.  His holiday action debacle Red One is about as overbearing as a Christmas parade held prior to Thanksgiving.  Titled after Santa’s code name, Red One positions itself as an espionage film in which an evil arctic witch named Gryla kidnaps Santa Claus for the purpose of punishing all of the global members of the much maligned “naughty list” of North Pole fame.  Santa is played aptly by an unmistakably sleeveless J.K Simmons (Whiplash).  Matching Saint Nick’s pointless muscular physique is his camplily named bodyguard Callum Drift, played to redundant expectation by Dwayne Johnson (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle).  What is actually surprising about Red One is how few surprises it offers, considering its crowded cast list and overstuffed runtime.

Adding to the convoluted and snow-covered path down which audiences must meander through Kasdan’s film is the addition of Chris Evans (Avengers: Endgame) who plays Jack O’Malley, a nefarious international hacker and middle man who is one of Earth’s apex members of the aforementioned naughty list.  From the moment of Evans’ arrival on screen, his teaming with Johnson is an inevitability, and is less surprising than tube socks as a stocking stuffer.  The mismatched Drift and O’Malley must set their moral differences aside in order to…yawn…save Christmas.  What ensues is a CG laden adventure crawling with archetypal characters and tediously conceived exposition.  Red One earns an occasional laugh but with its well-earned PG-13 rating, family audiences may feel somewhat betrayed by the comfort with which four letter words are spewed by characters who are attempting to save Santa Claus.   

Jake Kasdan’s Red One earns points for imaginativeness as it mostly steers clear of the traditional plot based tropes of holiday filmmaking, however there are far too many recognizable fingerprints to call the film original.  Most notably is the way the film hides The North Pole from the rest of the world, a facsimile of the manner in which Wakanda is camouflaged in Marvel’s Black Panther (2018).  Another notable Marvel Studios “homage” includes a bloated cast list rendering moot performances by talents such as Lucy Liu, Bonnie Hunt and Nick Kroll.  Red One may be the perfect holiday reminder that sometimes the best gifts don’t come in the largest packages.  Like an ambitious family frigidly queued outside a big box store hours before Black Friday, one cannot question the intent of a film like Red One, only its necessity. 

Target Score: 4/10  The holiday film season kicks off in earnest with Jake Kasdan’s overstuffed green screen adventure Red One.  Featuring predictable performances from Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans and the usually reliable J.K. Simmons, this is a film that ironically lands itself on the naughty list.