Red One

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on November 14, 2024.

(M) ★★

Director: Jake Kasdan.

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, J. K. Simmons, Kiernan Shipka, Bonnie Hunt, Kristofer Hivju, Nick Kroll, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Wesley Kimmel, Reinaldo Faberlle.

"Gwar, you say? No, never heard of them. I'll check them out."

The current craze in Hollywood is franchises. Unfortunately this means a lot of films are getting made with the starry-eyed approach of setting up a potential film series, while forgetting to make a good movie worthy of a series first. 

It’s a particularly fatal flaw in Red One, though it's actually just one of many major problems besetting this huge-budget Christmas turkey. The film is so intent on world-building that its story of Santa (Simmons) getting kidnapped becomes unnecessarily flabby early on and never recovers.

It also struggles to nail down who the main character is - another reason for the early flabbiness - with Dwayne Johnson's uptight North Pole security chief Callum Drift battling it out with Chris Evans' douchebag-with-a-heart-of-gold Jack O'Malley for top honours. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - movies can have more than one lead protagonist - but this particular jostling for poll position slows the narrative, and is another reason Red One stalls out of the blocks.

If it's not clear yet, most of the problems in this film are in the early stages, where the filmmakers seemingly choose world-building and The Rock over a sensible narrative structure. Allow me to explain.

Evans' Jack is a type of character known as an "audience surrogate". He's the character that knows as much as the audience knows, and as he is drawn into a new fantastical world or situation, we, the audience, learn how this new world/situation works by watching the audience surrogate learn and experience it. Think Dorothy dropping into Oz, Alice heading into Wonderland, Frodo stepping out of the Shire, or Neo discovering the Matrix exists. For the most part, we know what they know, and we learn as they learn.

In Red One, after a flashback to Jack's youth and a brief scene in a mall, we enter the fantastical world of Santa and his sidekick Callum Drift. We are taken to the North Pole and introduced to a mythological realm that is new to us, filled with giant reindeer, polar bears, elves, the works. It doesn't take long for Santa to get kidnapped (this isn't a spoiler, it's basically the film's selling point), sparking a chase sequence filled with plenty of dubious-looking CG.

Then we meet Jack, our audience surrogate. He's some kind of hacker/private eye/bounty hunter, and has a loose and unclear connection to the kidnapping, but he's very much from the real world (even if he's cartoonishly "bad", thus setting up a painfully obvious arc where he is going to reconnect with his estranged son and discover the meaning of Christmas or some shit).

At some point, these worlds are going to collide. In Red One, that takes way too long to happen. And  when it does happen, we have to go through the rigmarole of watching Jack learn about Santa and the giant reindeer and all the rest of it. Which we already know about. So there is no surprise or tension in Jack's discovery. If it was funnier, maybe it would be excusable, but watching Jack find out that Santa is real and that he's been kidnapped just becomes tiresome because we already know it.

(For a really great example of how bad this needless repetition can be, I recommend Green Lantern.)

By this point we're close to 40 minutes into the film. That's a lot of time to waste with effectively retelling stuff. One can’t help but wonder if the reason for taking us to Red One's mythical world to start with, instead of having the audience discover it while Jack does, is because of Dwayne Johnson’s presence as top-billed star and producer. It would make much more sense to bring his North Pole security chief in when Jack enters the mythological world, but instead we get a first act where Johnson's Callum is the lead character, and then another first act where Jack is the main character. 

(Are you bored yet?)

The film never recovers from there. The momentum is lost, which impacts the odd-couple relationship of Callum and Jack and the general pacing of the film. It also makes it hard for the script to zing, so it's never funny enough, despite the best efforts of Evans. 

It's also painfully predictable. Evans’ Jack is despicable, but in that annoyingly unrealistic way - the perfect-looking alcoholic, who is amazing at his job but shit at being a dad, and we just know where it's going to end up. 

Far be it from me to tell screenwriter Chris Morgan how to do his job - I mean the dude's written seven Fast & Furious movies, including the good ones. And there's likely a fair amount of producer/director meddling involved here to get this weird, bloated, repetitive first act to happen, and the screenwriter is just trying to keep the more important people happy.

But if this is what Red One is, don't expect a Red Two.