124 min | PG-13 | November 15, 2024 | Amazon MGM Studios
Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans team up to save a kidnapped Santa Claus. The film cost $250 million. It looks like it cost $250 million. It feels like it cost nothing.
Santa Claus has been kidnapped from the North Pole. Callum Drift is the head of North Pole security and he needs help finding him. He recruits Jack O’Malley, a skip tracer on the naughty list. They travel the world. They fight mythological creatures. They banter. Jake Kasdan directs a Christmas action comedy that treats its premise with the same exhausting literalism that has defined the worst blockbusters of the decade. The North Pole is a military operation. Santa is a combat-trained warrior played by J.K. Simmons. The elves have technology. The reindeer have upgrades. Every piece of Christmas mythology has been processed through the blockbuster machine until it is unrecognizable and joyless.
Dwayne Johnson plays Callum with the same stoic charm he brings to every role. He is professional and competent and there is nothing else. Johnson has become a franchise delivery system. He shows up. He hits his marks. He leaves no impression. Chris Evans plays the bounty hunter with a sarcastic energy that suggests he knows the material is beneath him. Evans is trying to have fun and the script will not let him. The chemistry between them is manufactured and functional. J.K. Simmons plays Santa as a tough guy with a heart of gold. Lucy Liu plays an elf commander. Kristofer Hivju plays Krampus with makeup that obscures whatever performance exists underneath. The cast is large and expensive and uniformly wasted.
The visual effects dominate every frame and they are polished and weightless. The North Pole is a CGI construction that looks expensive and feels hollow. The action sequences are choreographed with competence and shot without personality. Kasdan directed the Jumanji sequels with similar proficiency and similar emptiness. The production design creates environments that exist only as backdrops for set pieces. The score by Henry Jackman is loud and forgettable. The editing moves the film from one location to the next with mechanical efficiency. The film runs over two hours and there is not a single image worth remembering.
Amazon spent a quarter of a billion dollars on a Christmas film that has no Christmas in it. The decorations are there. The music cues are there. The sentiment is gestured at. But the spirit of what makes Christmas films work, the warmth and the specificity and the humanity, has been replaced by IP calculation and star power. Red One is a product. It was designed to be a product. It succeeds at being a product in the same way that a plastic Christmas tree succeeds at being a tree. It is shaped correctly. It is missing everything that matters.