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It’s never a harbinger of good tidings when the critics’ embargo for your $250-million Christmas franchise launcher is 9 p.m. PT on Election Day. But here we are.
Amazon MGM Studios’ bid at a Marvel-level action-comedy spectacle, the ho-ho-horrible “Red One” is a blockbuster-sized cinematic lump of coal, driven as if by narcotized reindeer on a sleigh of hideous CGI and charmless stars with only dancing dollar-shaped sugar plums on the mind. Directed by “Jumanji” reboot filmmaker Jake Kasdan and written by longtime “Fast & Furious” scribe Chris Morgan, here is a level-four naughty-lister that will make you wish Christmas were canceled altogether, a cynical, depressing holiday adventure about the abduction of a swoled-up Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons, at least seemingly amused to be in a red and white-fur-trimmed two-piece) from the North Pole.
We know that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who plays St. Nick’s personal security detail, can open any movie. “Red One” should expect to earn a decent bag of cash in theaters, all a bait-and-switch to lure Prime Video subscribers looking to pass the listless Christmas hours from unboxing presents to dinnertime with passive streaming viewing. Will all that a franchise make? To all a good night who find enough enjoyment to help propel this film to a sequel or more.
“Red One” was conceived by story writer and producer Hiram Garcia as the start of a Marvel-sized holiday franchise for Amazon MGM Studios, and the mythological world it opens up suggests a million snowglobes’ worth of possibilities for MCU-level interconnectedness. Leading alongside Johnson is Chris Evans as Jack O’Malley, a high-functioning-alcoholic hacker and bounty hunter estranged from his son (Wesley Kimmel) and for whom the workday starts passed out in an empty bathtub, a drained bottle of whiskey just out of focus.
If you don’t have the head for following Marvel’s head-spinning but often fundamentally dumb plot matrices, odds won’t much improve for keeping track of the cracked-out, under-baked story in “Red One,” as Jack’s latest job-for-hire inadvertently causes Santa Claus’ kidnapping. At the North Pole, Claus is readying for his grand night of chimney-hopping with milk and cookies and ringside support courtesy of Mrs. Claus (poor Bonnie Hunt). But Christmas may have to wait, as he’s taken hostage by the Christmas Witch, Gryla (poor Kiernan Shipka), a flesh-hungry ogress based in Icelandic mythology. St. Nick’s disappearance sends North Pole security head Callum Drift (Johnson) on a tailspin rescue mission on the very eve Callum was about to call it quits.
Also the head of a vaguely shadowy secret ops organization that protects creatures and folks from the mythological world is Lucy Liu, collectively onscreen for less time than it takes to sing the chorus of “Jingle Bells” and in an unfortunate wig to boot. She and her army of minions (including a talking CGI polar bear on its hindlegs) bring Jack in for questioning, though not after they’ve grilled the Headless Horseman as a possible culprit.
So the mismatched Jack (a “level-four naughty-lister,” according to North Pole brass) and Callum set out to retrieve Santa Claus in time for Christmas Eve. Shameless, just-in-time-for-holiday-shopping product placement is shoved in, from Mattel (Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots, Hot Wheels) and Hasbro (Monopoly), only alluding more to the capitalist imperatives that drove the project in the first place. And that could lead to myriad other cynical tie-ins to those toy giants’ own upcoming franchise movie plans.
There’s a ghastly sequence in which Jack and Callum interrogate Nick Kroll as a “death merc,” one of Gryla’s mercenaries, and are chased by a legion of monstrous snowmen whose Achilles’ heel is having their carrot nose ripped out. The witchy Gryla (a role even Shipka can’t inject life into) aims to steal a naughty list “the size of Rhode Island” and harvest the souls of all the bad-doers to galvanize her takeover of Christmas, or something like that.
And Gryla’s ex is the dark lord of Christmas and Santa Claus’s brother, Krampus (“Game of Thrones” star Kristofer Hivju in gargoylean prosthetics), another foe for Jack and Callum to face down — and for Callum to lose, and then win, in a slapping contest with in another of the film’s childish jabs at winky slapstick humor. It’s all slogging toward a sleigh-ride showdown in the winter night sky, reminiscent of the visually heinous boss levels of any Marvel movie, where CGI reaches an unintelligible pitch of PG-13-rated cacophony.
Perhaps “Red One” would work a little better (i.e., at all) if Evans and Johnson had any chemistry at all — at least this film should make you excited for Johnson’s entrée into serious screen acting with Benny Safdie’s upcoming wrestling biopic “The Smashing Machine.” You don’t watch “Red One” so much as stare ahead at the screen. It is a movie that is playing in front of you, I can comfortably give it that much, and for one meant to summon up the Christmas spirit, there’s not a whiff of mirth from the screenplay to the production level.
“Red One” will make you not only bummed about the holidays ahead, but about cinema’s future as well. Yet if you’ve been paying attention (and wasting your money at multiplexes in the process), the latter’s a reality far less shattering than the dawning of Santa Claus’s own upon a hopeful child. Make it a Christmas miracle, and cross this “Red One” off your list.
Grade: D
“Red One” opens in theaters from Amazon MGM Studios on Friday, November 15.