This profoundly depressing and blandly sentimental Christmas comedy for early November stars Dwayne Johnson as Santa’s bodyguard, out to rescue him from kidnappers and so save Christmas.
With an unvarying smirk, Chris Evans co-stars as a roguish professional thief (with an assumed heart of gold) called Jack O’Malley, whose cynical way of life was imprinted on him as a child when he found himself threatened with the naughty list for presuming to question Santa’s existence. Now he is separated from the mother of his child and neglectful of his son.
Without realising the awfulness of what he’s getting into, Jack is recruited by shadowy evildoers to steal the top-secret coordinates of a certain flying craft drawn by airborne reindeer, so that its pilot can be abducted. That is, Santa himself, played by JK Simmons, a buff Father Christmas who is devoted to press-ups and working out – perhaps because of the influence of Callum Drift, the head of his security detail, played with brontosaurus-headed stolidity by Johnson, who is in fact on the point of taking retirement because of a crisis of faith in their mission.
Callum and Jack team up to save the day, and Callum’s icy disapproval of Jack thaws when he sees what a great guy he really is – and his own vocation begins to return. Lucy Liu phones in the role of Santa’s chief of staff Zoe Harlow, and Kiernan Shipka (who was once Don Draper’s angelic daughter Sally in TV’s Mad Men) does her best with the role of wicked Christmas witch Gryla.
But wait. What exactly is that crisis of faith that Callum is talking about? Apparently, the naughty-list number is up by more than 20%. Wow. A worrying statistic. Humanity is getting worse. So the answer is … what? Prosecute the naughty-list rule more stringently? In fact, it is weirdly unclear what precisely the naughty-list rule really is, despite it being at the heart of a huge and cumbersome second-act plot development. Do the naughty-listers get fewer presents? Surely not no presents at all?
There is of course, in practice, no “naughty-list” rule, no one is seriously inconvenienced or disappointed in this Christmassy world, whose slush and gush smothers all attempts at gags (including a reference to Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock). Even the prologue implies that Jack’s sorrowing uncle will disprove his Santatheism. What we are of course left with is a deadly serious emphasis on the overwhelming importance of buying presents in stores.
There’s nothing wrong with a big-hearted film for Christmas, but this commercial and formulaic slice of content is a toy destined to be forgotten, not by Boxing Day, but mid-November.
• Red One is out in the UK on 6 November, in Australia on 14 November and in the US on 15 November.
