Jake Kasdan turns the North Pole into a security agency and Santa into a hostage, and J.K. Simmons is the only person on screen who seems to think Christmas is worth saving. A big, grey, joyless machine with one warm bulb in it.
Santa Claus, called Nick by his staff and played by J.K. Simmons, is kidnapped from the North Pole in the run-up to Christmas, and Red One is about the two men sent to fetch him. Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson) runs the Pole’s security and has handed in his notice. Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) is a tracker for hire who located the Pole for a client and did not ask why. Jake Kasdan’s film puts them in a car together for 124 minutes and waits for the sparks. They do not come. This is a Christmas film built like a spy film, and it has kept the guns and lost the tree.
The idea, credited to Hiram Garcia for story and Chris Morgan for screenplay, is that Christmas is a government operation. Lucy Liu’s Zoe runs something called the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority from a room full of screens. The elves wear earpieces. Santa has a code name, which is the title. It is a decent joke for about ten minutes, and then the film keeps telling it, in the same voice, with more helicopters each time.
Simmons is the reason to stay. He plays Nick as a large, unhurried, decent man who lifts weights, remembers every child’s name and is not frightened of anyone, and he does it without a wink. We were bored for long stretches of this film, and then we were cross about being bored, because every time Simmons came back on screen we could see the warmer, sillier picture the rest of the cast was not making. Evans gets the few laughs there are, playing Jack as a man who has let everyone down and knows it. Mary Elizabeth Ellis as his ex Olivia and Wesley Kimmel as his son Dylan give him two scenes of something like a life. Bonnie Hunt’s Mrs Claus is on screen for perhaps five minutes and is missed.
Johnson is the problem at the centre, and since he is also a producer it is a problem he chose. He plays Drift as a frown in a coat. The man is meant to have lost faith in people, but Johnson does not play doubt, he plays disapproval, and there is no give in him for Evans to bounce off. A buddy film needs two people willing to be embarrassed. Here one of them is.
The look does the rest of the damage. Bill Brzeski’s North Pole is steel, glass and grey concrete, an airport terminal with tinsel, and Michael Crow puts Santa’s guards in black tactical gear, so the one place in the film that could have been red and gold is the colour of a car park. Dan Mindel shoots the set pieces at night, a fight with computer-generated snowmen in a suburban street among them, and the figures never look as if they weigh anything or could hurt anyone. Three editors, Tara Timpone, Mark Helfrich and Steve Edwards, cut the fights so fast it is hard to say who hit whom. Henry Jackman’s score is loud throughout and rarely tells us how to feel.
There is one stretch where the film wakes up. The visit to Krampus, played by Kristofer Hivju under a good deal of prosthetic, is lit by firelight with real bodies in the frame, the creature slaps people for sport, and for ten minutes the picture has the handmade quality of an old fairy tale. Kiernan Shipka’s Gryla, a witch out of Icelandic legend, is introduced with some care too. Both are given less to do than the snowmen.
Kasdan made Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle with Johnson in 2017, and that film knew a trick this one has forgotten: give the stars a joke they can play against themselves rather than a premise they have to stand next to. The 12A certificate is about right, which is the difficulty. Small children will find the kidnapping and the monsters frightening, and anyone older will find the jokes about elves in earpieces too gentle to bother with.
Most critics disliked it and we are with them, with a nod to Simmons.
