Over time, Santa Claus movies have become inherently and forgivably silly. After all, there are only so many reasonable commercial twists you can put on one of the most commercialized characters in the Western world. It’s what has given us the contractual Santa (“The Santa Clause”); the pugilistic maniac Santa (“Violent Night”); the one about Santa’s degenerate brother (“Fred Claus”); and later this month, the Satan Santa (“Dear Santa”).
Perhaps, then, we should be resigned to the inevitable corporate momentum that produces something like “Red One,” a film that has the courage to ask: What if the Santa Claus story was like a Marvel movie?
In this one, directed by Jake Kasdan, Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) is inexplicably jacked, Dwayne Johnson leads a kind of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. team to protect the Big Red, and Chris Evans has revived the sensibilities of an older superhero alter ego (not the noble sincerity of Captain America, but the slacker snark of Johnny Storm). It’s all a particularly egregious piece of commercial slop — just a little too expensive and passable to qualify for being so bad it’s sort of fun.
Cynical and struggling to feel the holiday spirit, Callum Drift (Johnson), the head of security for Santa (a.k.a. Red One), hands in his resignation letter on Christmas Eve before working his final holiday. Of course, Santa is mysteriously kidnapped shortly after, sending Cal into a frenzied search, replete with a dull blur of explosions and far more fight sequences than an earnest Christmas movie should be allowed.
With the clock ticking, Cal and his boss, Zoe (Lucy Liu), are forced to call on Jack O’Malley (Evans), the tracker who helped facilitate the kidnapping itself. A deadbeat dad who, naturally, has Jason Bourne’s fighting skills, Jack has been a lifelong naughty-lister who’s only out for himself — until his ice-cold heart begins to melt while reluctantly assisting Cal.
For a movie featuring an anthropomorphic polar bear security agent, what you see is what you get — blandly polished inanity without any clever sense of irony or properly wacky sensibility that would make something this dumb actually float. Most of the supposed fun here hinges on a repetitive, dad-joke-like equation: puns on Christmas tropes that Johnson treats with his trademark no-nonsense stoicism, followed by Evans’s quip and an incredulous shake of the head.
In other words, Evans and Johnson are another iteration of the plug-in buddy dynamic that has paved the way to Johnson’s agreeable, if indistinct, rise to superstardom. For a post-Captain America Evans, one can only hope that he might soon mold, or even intentionally deform, his megawatt star power into more interesting shapes.
Ultimately, the funniest moments of “Red One” come not from the jacked Santa, nor from Johnson and Evans’s push and pull, but rather from Kristofer Hivju’s more knowingly silly rendition of Krampus, Santa’s estranged brother who’s called on for help. Whereas Santa gives presents to the nice, Krampus doles out punishment to the naughty. So which one of them delivered us this movie?
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