Dwayne Johnson's Losing Streak Continues With Red One, a Quarter Billion Dollar Christmas Stinker That's Not Much Fun

I love going to the movies with my ten-year-old son Declan—I love going to the movies, period. What I do not love, however, is the solid half-hour of commercials and trailers that precede every morning. 

I don’t mind the trailers quite as much, but the commercials are awful. I go to the theater to avoid commercials and not to see the same witless ad thirty or forty times. 

Sometimes, I am irritated by trailers as well. For the last months, for example, we’ve been afflicted by trailers for Red One. Whenever there’s something appropriate for children, I take my son, and a trailer for Red One has accompanied just about everything we’ve seen since the Summer. 

That means we have seen the trailer for Red One at least a dozen times. Whenever I see it, I think, “Good lord, that does not look good.” 

Sometimes, I utter those words out loud. Sometimes, I just think these thoughts, but the sentiments are always the same. My son invariably agrees with me, but he still went to see Red One with me because we see all of the appropriate movies together, and Dwayne Johnson’s latest is, if nothing else, suitable for ten-year-olds.

There’s a PG-13 level of violence and some language, but it’s a harmless Christmas movie starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans designed to appeal to the broadest possible family audience. 

When a movie costs a quarter of a billion dollars, it can’t afford to alienate anyone, really. Unfortunately, that leads to movies like Red One, which are inoffensive to an almost perverse degree.

I only had any hope for Red One because it is directed by Jake Kasdan, son of legendary screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, whose first three screenplay credits are for Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Body Heat. That, friends, is a strong beginning. 

Jake got off to an excellent start as well. He was one of the primary directors of Freaks & Geeks and debuted with the cult mystery comedy Zero Effect before re-teaming with Judd Apatow for The TV Set and Walk Hard. 

Alas, that is not what got him the no doubt well-compensated if creatively unfulfilling job of directing a 250 million dollar Dwayne Johnson/Chris Evans Netflix Christmas buddy comedy. 

Instead, he got the gig because he directed 202017’sumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and 202019’sumanji: The Next Level. They’re critically well-regarded blockbusters that proved that Kasdan could combine action, fantasy, and comedy on a big scale and work well with Dwayne Johnson.

Kasdan should have been the perfect man to direct Red One, but he is a journeyman gun-for-hire at best and a hack at worst. 

The director of Walk Hard, one of the funniest movies of the last twenty years, made an action-comedy that’s never funny but also disappointing on an action level. Red One is equally unengaging emotionally and thematically and features one of Dwayne Johnson’s worst performances. 

It’s not a coincidence that Johnson became less likable and appealing as an onscreen action hero when his personal and professional reputation nose-dived. The former wrestler used to be seen as a hard worker and a good guy. Now he’s derided as an arrogant prima donna notorious for his massive ego and diva antics. 

In Red One, Johnson plays Callum Drift, the head of security for Saint Nick (J.K. Simmons) and the leader of ELF, which stands for Enforcement Logistics and Fortification. He’s essentially Kris Kringle’s secretary of Defense. 

Callum is Johnson’s usual scowling, faintly robotic badass, only this time he’s kicking butt for Santa Claus. He’s badass, fighting a righteous war on behalf of candy canes, flying sleighs, and magical reindeer. 

A better movie with a better script would find culture-clash humor in the incongruent juxtaposition of military toughness and Christmas cheer, but Red One’s cynical combination of Yuletide hokum and action mayhem feels joyless and half-hearted. 

This is a true passionless project, a labor of no love for all involved. It’s a paycheck gig, high-concept nonsense designed to be consumed and forgotten simultaneously. 

In a role and film that no one will remember him for, Chris Evans is acceptable as Jack O’Malley, a brilliant bounty hunter and tracker and a small-time criminal revered worldwide for his remarkable skill set. 

He’s supposed to be a charming rogue in the Han Solo mode who discovers a sense of idealism while working with, and for, the good guys. At least that’s the idea.

When Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) is kidnapped, Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu), the hardass director of Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority, a secretive organization in charge of enforcing a peace treaty between mythical creatures and humanity. 

Red One occupies a world where Santa Claus is real and delivers gifts to good little gentile girls and boys on Christmas Eve. In this expensive yet rinky-dink universe, Krampus, the mythological malevolent yin to Santa’senovolent yang, is Saint NiNick’srother and eternal rival. 

Krampus is joined on the naughty side of the great naughty/nice divide by Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), a shape-shifting ogre from Icelandic mythology and an aggro snowman with attitude. 

There’s also a badass anthropomorphic polar bear agent named Garcia, who figures prominently in advertising but is only in the movie for five minutes at best.

Red One would like to be the Men in Black of Christmas movies involving Yuletide lore and mythology, but it barely reaches the level of Bright. Red One is a maudlin tribute to wonder and imagination that is itself perversely short on wonder and imagination. 

Jack couldn’t be more different than the straight, by-the-book Callum, a veteran of all things Christmas. In a wonderful, never before seen development, the veteran tough guy is getting too old for this shit and has one final Christmas left before retirement. 

Yet these very different men must put aside their differences to find Santa and save Christmas. 

Red One is heavy on lore and product placement, and lore involving product placement. We learn that toy stores are portals employed by the Christmas Military Industrial Complex to facilitate their kind-hearted schemes. 

This is largely an excuse to highlight as many popular toy brands as possible, some of which figure prominently in the proceedings, most notably Hot Wheels cars that become actual human-sized automobiles and Rock Em Sock Em robots that similarly get big and start knocking motherfuckers out. 

Jake lives comfortably outside the law, but he’s also, tragically, that most ubiquitous and tiresome of holiday movie cliches: the horrifically flawed dad who works too much and misses one of his children’s events. Subsequently, he must learn, from experience, how to be a better father and less selfish, more compassionate human being. 

It’s the kind of tacky, ubiquitous cliche that Walk Hard destroyed with comic malice but that Red One plays straight. Red One is more action-focused than most Christmas movies but doesn’t forget to bring the schmaltz in a third act that cynically asks us to care about its bland characters and their overly familiar conflicts. 

As a thin, wiry man best known for playing prison Nazis and angry authority figures, Simmons is an unlikely choice to play Santa Claus, but he’s easily the best part of the film. 

Simmons plays Santa Claus as an insanely athletic, agile man who loves his job and the joy he brings to children worldwide. He has the best job in the world and knows it. 

It is unfortunate that Simmons' skinny Santa disappears for a solid hour so that the show can focus on a Johnson/Evans relationship sorely lacking in chemistry and humor. 

Johnson gives Evans nothing to work with. Johnson has made a lucrative career out of sending up his tough guy image and poking fun at himself, but his performance here is strangely humorless.

Trailers have two primary purposes. First and foremost, they’re supposed to sell movies by making them look better than they are. They’re also supposed to give audiences a sense of what a movie will entail. The trailers for Red One do an abysmal job of selling a cinematic lump of coal but give an excellent sense of the film’s mediocrity. 

Red One, I’m afraid, is simply not much fun. 

One and a half Stars out of Five