In recent years, movie studios have moved to capitalize on the trendy debate over Die Hard’s status as a Christmas movie: bona fide holiday classic or an action flick that just happens to take place amid the Yuletide season? After endless cloying stories of saccharine and serendipitous love, audiences have been pining for a version of Love Actually where Colin Firth plays a muscle-clad Rambo on a mission to rescue Santa.
Attempting to tap into this niche, Chris Morgan, the screenwriter behind a slew of the Fast and Furious sequels, has created Red One, a bloated, $250 million production set in a world where mythical creatures ranging from the Headless Horseman to Santa Claus roam free. But despite its promising premise, Red One is a misfire from the start.
J.K. Simmons is cast as a buff, bench-pressing St. Nick, a departure from the traditional fat and jolly Santa, but he’s barely in the movie at all. The film sidelines Santa early on (more on this in a moment, but an interesting choice of direction for a Christmas movie), relegating Simmons to mere minutes of screen time. Instead, the focus shifts to Dwayne Johnson as Callum Drift, Santa’s secret service security head — the same brawny archetype that Johnson portrays in every movie, given that he has the acting range of a barstool. In a recent interview, Johnson compared Red One to Oppenheimer, citing Nolan’s World War II epic as an inspiration for his film and motivation for releasing it in IMAX. Ironically, this may be the best joke of Johnson’s career.
The film’s highlights are all at points when it isn’t taking itself too seriously. There is an early scene where Santa, after a visit to the local mall to take family photos, is escorted to an army base in a white Suburban — from there, a pair of F-22 Raptors accompany him and his reindeer-guided sleigh back to the North Pole. But outside a handful of such memorably ridiculous scenes, Red One is a case study of a filmmaker trying to do too much and overstuffing a film with ideas.
The plot is unnecessarily complicated by having far too many characters. Chris Evans plays a downtrodden and divorced computer hacker who starts the plot by helping locate Santa’s clandestine North Pole lair, resulting in his kidnapping. He continues to be a part of the film for no reason other than the director’s desire to pair Evans with Johnson, who share little chemistry anyway. Although Drift’s defense team (aptly named ELF) includes a 10-foot-tall bipedal polar bear with human intelligence, he opts to drag Evans along on the rescue mission despite him having no reason to continue being there.
It is unknown how producers allocated the film’s budget, but judging by screen time, they could only afford two A-list leads. With Santa safely kidnapped and stowed away for much of the film, we largely follow Evans and Johnson in a mediocre buddy-cop-style action movie. There’s a scene midway through where they fly to Bora Bora in search of clues and end up fighting their way through Eastern European gangsters and then animated, armed snowmen. It feels like an effort to prolong the plot, as they ultimately learn that Santa’s captor is the most infamous and sinister witch in their world named the Winter Witch, a former lover of Santa’s estranged brother. I am no Lt. Columbo, but this would have been my first suspect.
Apart from a scant few nods to the season and Johnson exclaiming, “Let’s go save Christmas,” little about this movie has anything to do with the holiday at all. At least Die Hard’s soundtrack featured “Let It Snow.” Red One runs on a bland score recycled from Marvel’s Avengers.
What made Christmas action crossovers such as Fatman (2020) work was that they engaged your imagination instead of wasting time and resources building the superfluous details of their own outlandish worlds. In Fatman, there is a scene where Santa exclaims at his would-be assassin, “You think you’re the first?” — immediately suggesting reams of backstory without having to invent any of it.
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We don’t need to know the vagaries of bureaucratic organizations such as MORA (the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority), headed by an overacting Lucy Liu, which add nothing of value to the plot. Note to screenwriters: More lore does not equate to better storytelling. It is these excesses and overcomplications that bloat the story into a two-hour film and ruin any chance of fun.
Ultimately, it’s unclear who the target audience is for Red One. It lacks the Christmas sentimentality to appeal to families, and its unserious, awkward tone and PG-13 rating prevent it from being a proper action film. It feels like a cookie-cutter throwaway contrived to pay its actors exorbitant salaries — isn’t that what Christmas is all about? In the end, we’d all be better off rewatching Die Hard.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog and a computer engineer in Toronto pursuing his MBA.
