As the holiday season approaches, “Red One” brings a new take on how Christmas must be saved again, but ultimately falls short of offering anything particularly unique.
“Red One” doesn’t add anything new to the Christmas movie genre, but I have to admit the idea that Santa Claus needs to be protected as if he were the president of the United States was hilarious.
If it could have focused more on the storytelling aspects of the film through the characters and its Christmas theme instead of the action, it would have had a lot of potential to be a new Christmas classic.
The movie's concept is that Santa, also referred to as “Red One” by his secret service adjacent force known as E.L.F. (Enforcement, Logistics and Fortification), was kidnapped and must be found in time to deliver presents for Christmas.
The movie’s most notable stars include Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Callum Drift, Chris Evans as Jack O’Malley and J.K. Simmons as Santa.
Johnson’s character, Callum, is essentially just The Rock playing himself, something the actor constantly does in his acting roles.
The Rock playing himself can be seen in many of his movies, such as the film franchise “Fast and Furious,” “Moana,” “San Andreas,” “Red Notice” and now “Red One.”
Callum is Santa’s most important bodyguard on the Enforcement, Logistics and Fortification force, but decides to resign because of the rapidly growing naughty list shortly before Santa is kidnapped.
However, Callum must save Santa to save Christmas anyway despite having resigned, but his character arc is predictable and not very fleshed out.
By the end of the film, Callum’s character development hasn’t gone through much to justify the way his story ends and he seems to add more action to the film instead of contributing anything genuine.
One character that did have better development was Chris Evans’s character, Jack O’Malley.
At the beginning of the film, Jack is a terrible father who doesn’t spend enough time with his son, but throughout his journey in the film, he learns more about what it means to be a dad.
He was certainly the character who experienced the most development throughout the plot, whereas most other characters remained flat.
Another weak point in this movie is its lack of a Christmas theme. Despite it being a Christmas movie, there are moments in the movie when I forgot this was the movie’s genre.
The movie centers around Santa being kidnapped but in the process, it hardly gives time for the audience to learn more about this particular Santa.
I was intrigued by the little quirks offered by J.K. Simmons’s portrayal of Santa in the beginning, such as his relationship with his bodyguards and his reindeer as well as his impressive feats of strength, but Simmons doesn’t get much screen time until the final act of the movie.
“Red One” is more like an action film with a Christmas twist instead of the reversal, which made the story uninteresting at certain points.
A concept introduced at the beginning of the movie was that more people were on the naughty list than the nice list for the first time in history.
The antagonist of the film wants to punish everyone who has done anything wrong, especially people on the naughty list, but the reasoning lacks any kind of explanation.
If the movie played more into the idea of finding a solution to this problem, it may have made the plot more interesting and added to the Christmas spirit, but the ending did not address this major plot point for the antagonist.
Speaking of the antagonist, the severe underdevelopment of the villain, Gryla, played by Kiernan Shipka, was a major weak point of the film as well.
Gryla is a Christmas witch who is determined to punish everyone who has done anything wrong, which from her perspective will make the world a better place.
The director doesn’t put in much effort to explain who Gryla is and why she does the things she does.
Audiences love to see villains they can empathize with and understand the motivation behind why they do the bad actions that they do, but Gryla lacks that backstory for audiences to empathize with her.
“Red One” uses the idea of telling rather than showing to portray the actions of the villain, which makes her uninteresting.
The plot doesn’t show you how Gryla got to the point where she is, other characters just state who she is and what she’s after.
Another factor that may be adding to this is the mystery of who the villain is at the beginning of the film, so the audience doesn’t get to know who it is until well into the film.
The action in this film lacks much creativity but still is enjoyable to watch.
The problem with this movie is that it seemed to prioritize its action sequences over its storytelling and left little regard for the storytelling.
Despite my gripes with “Red One,” I still enjoyed aspects of the action movie with notes of a Christmas classic, and it still has funny comedic moments that made me want to keep watching.
I would have loved to see more time spent on the plot point of the movie as it lacks a lot of development until the end, but I could certainly appreciate where the filmmakers were going with this concept, despite its predictability.
