Red One

It’s hard to honour Christmas in your heart every day when a new movie about Santa Claus is proudly described as a “four-quadrant” “tentpole” with “multiple ancillaries” and franchise potential. Such an approach positively demands cynicism, and at times this Dwayne Johnson vehicle seems to justify it. Jake ‘Jumanji’ Kasdan is a good enough director to find some heart, and some comedy, despite the focus-grouped priorities that seem to have shaped the film elsewhere.

We open with a slightly pointless scene-setting for a young Jack O’Malley (Wyatt Hunt, later Chris Evans) to establish that he’s always been terribly cynical but also that life hasn’t been easy. We then see him in adulthood, casually causing chaos and stealing from other people in support of a gambling habit and a wasted life. Meanwhile, across town, Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) is visiting a mall to stretch his legs before Christmas, accompanied by his heavy, Cal (Dwayne Johnson). He’s then escorted back to a US Air Force base, where his reindeer are waiting to take him home. But there, he’s kidnapped, and Cal must team up with Jack to find and rescue him in order to – yes – save Christmas.

Evans and Johnson know what they’re doing, but none of it is fresh.

The “save Christmas” bit is familiar from a million movies, as are the mismatched heroes: one strait-laced, one schlubby. Johnson is basically Hobbs with magic toys; Evans is playing the same utter schmuck he’s been choosing since he bowed out of the MCU. Both know what they’re doing, but none of it is fresh. Simmons is better, playing a warmer note than usual, but that’s about it for Chris Morgan’s script: Lucy Liu, Bonnie Hunt and Kiernan Shipka are all stuck with thankless, one-note roles. Kristofer Hivju’s Krampus has more to do, presumably making him the most likely candidate for the next “ancillary” spin-off.

There are some fun moments here: The Rock gets a clever fight move we haven’t seen from him before, while some violent snowmen on a beach are a nice touch (even if the setting is just an excuse for some skimpy bikinis). The mirrored arcs of the two leads – one a guy who never believed in Christmas; the other someone who’s lost his faith in people – are well delivered, but so much of the rest just feels engineered into oblivion: an action scene here, a random bit of mythology there. The militarism of Father Christmas is deeply inappropriate, and the film’s high-tech vision of the North Pole here has been done to death, notably in Arthur Christmas and Disney’s Prep And Landing. Also, why does it look like Aquaman’s Atlantis? And what’s a penguin doing on staff?

Making a truly classic Christmas movie is hard; despite a slew of new ones every year, the last crop of true classics date back to 2003. But you still have to approach them with genuine goodwill in your heart, not some focus-group scores and aspirations of a shared holiday universe. If this had just reined in the bombast and focused on the characters, it might have been something. As it is, it’s an awfully big box for such a small amount of cheer.