' ' Cinema Romantico: Red One

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Red One


“Red One” might have received a theatrical run, grossing $185 million worldwide, but distributed as it was through Amazon Prime, it still feels like a streaming movie in spirit, the nadir of the genre whereas Monday’s reviewed “Carry-On” was the apex. Director Jake Kasdan’s action-comedy equates Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) with the President – Red One is Kris Kringle’s codename – and when he is kidnapped by some evildoers seeking to cancel Christmas, the leader of North Pole security (Dwayne Johnson) and the world’s greatest hacker (Chris Evans) team up for an unlikely rescue mission. Initially it suggests “Air Force One” crossed with “The Night the Reindeer Died,” the spoof movie trailer that opened the Christmas Carol-inspired comedy “Scrooged,” a high enough concept, frankly, only to go higher by borrowing all manner of folkloric holiday characters to try and weave a comic book-like tapestry that causes a two-hour movie to feel even longer and sink under the weight of its own faux clever bloat. 

Johnson, for once, isn’t self-admiringly in on the joke, espousing such belief in Callum’s gift-giving mission in one scene that I thought of the old Statler Brothers song “I Believe in Santa’s Cause,” but a movie so cynical has no idea what do with such earnestness. The devil-may-care charm of Evans, meanwhile, goes wasted once again while the subplot in which his character’s son frets over his dad missing Christmas eventually just settles as that same hoary subplot as opposed to a send-up of it. And rather than a real Christmas classic that families might sit down to watch together each holiday season, “Red One” proves a new-fangled background Christmas classic, destined each December to be on but not watched, noisy wallpaper while parents are wrapping presents, or while kids are watching videos on their tablets, ultimately taking the form of its cacophonous but forgettable CGI-laden action scenes, sound and fury signifying nothing.

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