The number of problems with director Jake Kasdan's "Red One" could stuff many a stocking, but you can't fault it for its sprawling scale and ambition. Amazon MGM's action-adventure Christmas film is the latest cinematic stab at modernizing the work and vocation of Santa Claus, re-imagining Jolly St. Nick as a bench-pressing, snickerdoodle-cookie-loving J.K. Simmons, just one of many mythological beings that exist in our world. He's under the watchful eye of the S.H.I.E.L.D-esque Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority (MORA), one of the many ways "Red One" tries to tease out its own cinematic universe. But bigger doesn't always mean better, and even with a globetrotting narrative, A-list stars, and reindeer with the ability to hyperspace travel like the Millennium Falcon, these elements can't cover over thematic negligence and a garish visual palette. It's all gaudy wrapping with no substance.
For its first act, "Red One" manages to dazzle purely through the novelty of how it takes established characters and gives them a modern twist, even if they lead to unintentionally hilarious moments. In an early scene, Santa and his reindeer are escorted out of Philadelphia back to the North Pole by fighter jets (it's Claus as you've never seen him before, folks: backed by the full might of the military-industrial complex!). For the sculpted Saint Nick, delivering presents is a matter of physical skill and prowess; gift delivery is an air-tight operation that has to be rehearsed, choreographed, and trained for 364 days a year. After their trip to Philadelphia, the head of North Pole security, Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), confides to Santa that he'd like to retire after this year's Christmas run, having lost faith in their mission given the uptick of people who are on Santa's Naughty List. But after renowned hacker Jack O'Malley (Chris Evans) unknowingly sells information revealing Santa's location in the North Pole, a group of enforcers kidnaps him. They're led by the winter witch, Grýla (Kiernan Shipka), who thinks Kris Kringle has gone soft and plans to siphon out his magic and imprison everyone on his Naughty List in magical snow globes. Callum and Jack reluctantly team up to find Santa and stop Grýla as the world faces the possibility of no Christmas.
There's intrigue in how Johnson plays Callum as someone with a crisis of faith, even with direct access to the "deity" he serves. But it's done with a self-seriousness that doesn't mesh with the thrills "Red One" tries to deliver. He's channeling his best Father Toller from "First Reformed," someone who's lived a century or two too long and has seen the Grinches of the world prosper one too many times. There's potential for exploring how a lapsed believer like Callum could be tempted by the quick and easy, Old Testament-style wrath Grýla provides compared to Santa's doctrine of grace. But the film lacks the emotional bandwidth and trust in its characters to allow them to grow beyond their surface level characterizations.
A film that features Santa's demonic evil brother knocking the head off of a supersized Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot didn't need to offer its take on the dangers of late-stage capitalism. The film spends much of its runtime trying to make Callum's disenchantment feel multidimensional; its saccharine takeaway that kindness will overcome the "naughty" forces of the world ends up feeling disingenuous.
Evans plays an earlier draft of his character from "Knives Out," albeit one that's slightly less profane, and his dynamic with Johnson fails to register. Both of these characters are different shades of cynicism, begrudgingly working together, and there's little room for the two to bring out other sides or help each other grow in the way the best buddy-cop films do. Likewise, after seeing Lucy Liu, who plays the director of MORA, deliver some of her best work in a film like the upcoming "Presence," it's disheartening to see her in a role like this, spending her time barking orders and doing the occasional fight scene, and nothing more.
It's a problem when your action-adventure film cannot deliver on said action, and those fight sequences, which should have been a selling point for the film, end up being some of its worst features. Take the first major set piece where Santa is kidnapped by Grýla's shapeshifting henchmen and Callum chases after them in the middle of a night snowstorm. The way Kasdan and cinematographer Dan Mindel shoot the action is choppily executed and so hideously lit that there's no clear sense of what's happening; it's ugly chaos. Ironically, it's in the film's small-scale sequences, like when Callum and Krampus (Kristofer Hivju) play Krampusschlap and proceed to slap each other across the face till one of them is knocked out, that have the kinetic thrills that are sorely lacking in the bigger set pieces. These fights feel lived in, and it at least feels like Johnson and Hivju were interacting in the same space rather than being digitized scans of actors being dragged across a screen by VFX artists.
While "Red One" may scratch at some interesting ideas about lamenting the world's cruelties, it lacks the narrative depth and commitment to fully explore its angst. After his abduction, Simmons' Santa spends most of the film in a comatose state, his power slowly drained from him. That encapsulates the feeling of watching this film; a state of unconsciousness might be the best way to enjoy it.
