Skip to main content

Red One is a Creatively Cheap, Pathetically Desperate Bit of Meaningless Holiday Sludge

There is something curiously hopeful about Red One. It is the kind of movie that can only come at the end of an era, when studios have saturated the market so emphatically with a particular breed of malformed populist mush that there’s virtually nowhere left to go with it. Red One is an abysmal movie, vividly awful on just about every level. But some solace may be taken in what it represents for this current, largely vacant age in Hollywood. It’s embarrassing they let it get to this point.
It’s not the first time I’ve said this, and may not be the last, but Red One is the kind of bad movie you’d expect to show up in the background of a different better movie as a satire of Hollywood cynicism and shallowness -at least two of the major actors in this movie have been in other movies that use this device. It is what happens when a studio tries to graft the formulas and conventions of a superhero franchise product onto the trappings of traditional Christmas mythology. And the result is just very dumb and desperate, and completely devoid of any genuine virtue or earnestness holiday movies are expected to deliver on. Christmas cynicism packaged in a perfect bow.
Stealing in equal parts from The Santa Clause and Arthur Christmas in terms of the structure of its North Pole operation, Red One depicts a highly sophisticated, technologically-advanced society revolving around Santa Claus and his annual Christmas enterprise. It is a world populated by various mythological creatures and anthropomorphic animals and Dwayne Johnson’s Callum Drift is an ELF (Enforcement, Logistics, Fortification) who has for centuries been the trusted bodyguard of Santa -played by J.K. Simmons in his second, far less effective go as the holiday avatar. Santa winds up kidnapped by powerful infiltrators of the North Pole, and Callum ultimately is forced to team up with Chris Evans as the cynical expert hacker Jack O’Malley, who unknowingly tracked Santa down and sold the information to his anonymous client. And it just so happens he’s a washed-up absentee father in need of that old fashioned Christmas spirit.
After a flashback to his childhood (where he tries to persuade other children of the non-existence of Santa), one of the first things we see Jack do is literally steal candy from a baby. It’s a joke, but it does perfectly represent how shallow a character this is -and yet he’s marginally less so than just about everybody else in the movie. Jake Kasdan directs, from a screenplay by Chris Morgan of the Fast & Furious franchise, that brings over some of that series’ lunacy but none of its heart or fun. Everybody is written to such a condescending stereotype and most of the actors, Johnson especially, are way too happy to play into them as dimly as possible. Johnson is the black hole of any charm this movie had an outside chance of generating -stiff, serious, and severe, not at all convincing in his convictions around the holiday spirit and nowhere near as cool as Johnson and Kasdan desperately want him to be. Callum is just a very bad choice for a lead in general: an enforcer for Santa Claus whose main character conflict is simply one of cynicism.
Jack is the more obvious protagonist, likely kept a little below Callum in focus and credit due to Johnson’s hero contract. But in his case it is such a derivative trope, smeared in the veneer of New England wise-ass that is becoming Evans’s new archetype. And the way the script tries to be clever through him is just egregious, often to comment in a hacky way on the world and conventions the film is steeped in. He'll acknowledge they've got to save Christmas, but only after a labourious exercise in how trite that statement is. He's got no right to make that crack -his relationship to his own kid is as trite as they come.
The movie goes to lengths to bring into its orbit a catalogue of mythologies to set up as its own. The villain of the piece is Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), a witch in Icelandic folklore, while the demonic Krampus (Kristofer Hivju) figures into the story as Santa's estranged brother -all three of whom are ultimately involved in a climactic battle on a digital set-piece resembling the bridge from the end of Thor: Ragnarok -the movie's ambition to set up a holiday-oriented MCU is not particularly subtle. There is an elite agency built around keeping Santa's secret, led by a remarkably boring Lucy Liu, and supernatural networks of toy stores and mythical creatures in disguise a la Men in Black (all of which Jack responds to with a dry sarcasm-coated bewilderment). Callum is a superhuman of some unspecified variety with a special device that shrinks or enlarges toys and himself for convenience or bouts of messy non-substantive action. And while the airs of conscious silliness are put on initially, the movie expects its world and these rules to be taken seriously by the audience, or at least as much so as the high-concept franchises it is a meticulous imitation of.
Of course it is also obliged to relay some kind of conventional wholesome Christmas message about the importance of family -this in a movie where Chris Evans leers at a woman's ass. But it's not enough that the premise given to Jack is so drearily stale, but his character arc is rendered with just as little thought. Virtually on a dime he makes the choice to be a good guy, and not by half-measure either: he becomes willing to sacrifice himself to ensure Christmas is saved. All the while, the credence of this goal for the heroes is wafer-thin. Kasdan does nothing to give the themes any weight, there is no interest in actually engaging with them; all the Christmas iconography is just window-dressing, the Christmas song needle-drops (and only the most overplayed ones) just sound-bites. This movie is pretty ambivalent to the holiday it purports to revolve around.
Red One's designs are so brazenly transparent, its holiday-themed heart so intensely artificial that the movie on a whole doesn't seem real. Like it's a prank to see who all would buy it (evidently not many). Even in this era of unprecedented artistic and creative rot, it's rare for a mass-market Hollywood movie to miss the mark so profoundly and look so nakedly desperate doing so. The industry is not prepared for the franchise bubble to burst and Red One may be a canary in the coal mine. It is exceptionally lazy and uninspired, even more starkly hollow and bankrupt. A movie that expects so little of its general audience, that it is honestly insulting. As moviegoers of all stripes, all of us deserve better than Red One.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more