VERDICT: This search-and-rescue tale of a kidnapped Santa Claus doesn’t reinvent the action-movie wheel, but it’s a fun spin on holiday tropes.
“What if Santa were, like, badass?” seems to be the motivating idea behind Red One, and while it hits all the action-movie marks you might expect, it’s a clever melding of Christmas-movie cheer and post-modern, banter-packed superhero saga.
The real superhero of the piece is, of course, J.K. Simmons’ jacked Santa Claus — he eats all those cookies because gift delivery burns millions of calories — but since this is a story about Santa getting kidnapped, the spotlight is on his number-one bodyguard Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson). After centuries of faithful service, Drift has submitted his resignation, since all he can see of mankind these days is their naughty side. But when his boss gets snatched just before Christmas Eve, he’s saddled with one last assignment.
Working alongside Zoe (Lucy Liu), a representative for a shadow agency that oversees the world’s mythological beings, Drift finds his only lead on the case: the very, very naughty Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), who’s a hacker, a tracker, and a mostly absentee dad. The first two skills come in handy as Drift wades into a conspiracy that includes a Christmas witch (Kiernan Shipka) and Santa’s estranged brother Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), and the latter comes into play when Jack’s son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel, The Mandalorian) also gets taken by the Yuletide villains.
So yes, for the most part, Red One is utter nonsense, but director Jake Kasdan (the Jumanji reboots) and screenwriter Chris Morgan (Fast Five) make it work by playing it utterly straight. We get a Santa who’s steadfastly no-nonsense about his job, serious about the task of delivering toys but also eternally optimistic about people tapping into the best parts of themselves.
(He’s ably supported by a nurturing spouse, played by Bonnie Hunt, who plays a key role in the operation.) It further helps that Johnson and Liu play their roles with total deadpan, taking this magical world seriously while Evans’ Jack figures out how to grow a conscience along the way.
Every Santa movie that shows the North Pole shapes it to fit the mood of the story, and production designer Bill Brzeski (Aquaman) provides a sleek, high-tech version, with ramps and gates that come in handy for the occasional high-speed chase. (It also acknowledges the past by including Santa’s original, rustic workshop, preserved as a museum piece in the middle of this fortress and industrial park.)
And like every post–Arthur Christmas Santa movie, Red One answers the question “How does St. Nick get to all those houses and squeeze down all those chimneys in one night?” For the record, it’s a pretty convincing explanation. For all the CG wizardry involved, many of the machines and devices that matter to the story have an old-school, analog feel, balancing out the scenes where Drift uses a digital doohickey to turn Hot Wheels cars and Rock-Em Sock-Em Robots into life-size, functional objects.
There’s a proud history of crime-genre holiday movies, from noir films like Lady in the Lake and Blast of Silence to more recent action extravaganzas like Batman Returns, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Violent Night. (And yes, Virginia, Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and there will be no further questions.)
The challenge is to balance the mayhem with the holly jolly, to blow stuff up while also allowing troubled characters to find the nice in themselves and each other, and Red One fulfills both of those wish-list items with a cheeky finesse.
