There’s a lot going on in Jake Kasdan’s Red One, and two of the Christmas movie’s biggest set pieces encapsulate that quantity. One involves a contingent of snowmen on steroids, cutting a path through an Aruba beachside resort where they’re trying to freeze people with snow swords. Another features an epic slapping competition between Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Krampus, a horned, goat-like creature who is Santa Claus’ brother, a scene that also features life-sized Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. By description alone, neither of these scenes should work, but both totally do. And so does the movie.
We don’t normally review movies at ReelGood a month after they’ve hit cinemas, but this year’s big theatrically released Christmas movie has just had a new incarnation on streaming. That’s right, you can now enjoy Red One in your own living room for free if you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber, which is both another disappointing milestone on the road to the death of cinema, and a fortuitous way to enjoy this pleasantly goofy movie without having to wait a whole year before you’re again in the mood for it. Its release pattern may make it a bit of a hybrid between the big screen and the small, but there’s no doubt that this imagination overload is the stuff of large canvases, using our largest holiday as paint.
Just packing the film with big stars is not, these days, an indication of that larger canvas, as both Johnson and co-star Chris Evans have headed their share of shoddy Netflix debuts. It is, however, a good bet there are going to be some charming personalities that help weave the nuttiness together, who also include Lucy Liu, Kristofer Hivju, Nick Kroll, Kiernan Shipka, and J.K. Simmons as the big guy himself, the titular Red One, also known as Santa Claus.
We meet Santa in a shopping mall, and at first have reason to think this might be one of those guys who dons a fake beard to get money for booze. We should read more into the hulking figure above him: Callum Drift (Johnson), the head of North Pole security lo these last five centuries, who’s always got his eye open for threats to both the person of Santa Claus and the institution surrounding him. Callum has lost his faith in humans now that there are officially more on the naughty list than the nice, and he’s just tendered his resignation. This Christmas will be his last night at Santa’s side.
It could also be Santa’s last night. In the 48 hours leading up to the big night, there’s a breach of security at headquarters, and soon nobody can locate the guy they call Nick. The exact location of the workshop had always remained hidden, but a particularly talented contractor called The Wolf (Evans) is pretty good at finding things that need to be found. By day he is Jack O’Malley, divorcee and father to his distant son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel), who ensconced himself on the naughty list when he was Dylan’s age. He knows as little about who hired him to locate the coordinates as Callum and Callum’s director (Liu) do, but he can help – for a price.
Red One is the sort of loud, gadget-filled contraption that should piss off traditionalists and anyone seeking something wholesome, both textually and thematically, in a holiday viewing season. It’s also a lot of fun. It’s hardly the first film to frame Santa’s workshop as a high-tech 21st century – or possibly even 22nd century – fortress. But it might be the first film in which Santa’s head ELF – the acronym for the security division is Enforcement Logistics and Fortification – has a fancy bracelet that allows him to alter the size of objects, and himself, as if he’d escaped from an Ant-Man movie. In a particularly dogged pursuit of the fleeing kidnappers, Callum conjures a snowmobile from out of nowhere, which is because he was carrying it in his pocket.
The ideas come fast and furious in a movie like Red One. One of the other security bigwigs is a polar bear who wears Callum’s same red and green uniform, and there are a variety of other species of animal working in the various control rooms. In fact, about the only animals here who don’t speak are the reindeer, impressive beasts with antlers to match.
Too many ideas can be as much a problem as too few, but Red One gets the balance down. Thanks to portals in the back rooms of toy stores that help Jack and Callum travel the globe, we get a mood shift about every 15 minutes, each one functioning as a mini reset every time the film threatens to go off the rails. And it helps that each one has a creative set piece in store, validating the crazy choices and boosting our flagging energy at regular intervals.
Red One ends on a third great set piece that is not worth spoiling, but let’s just say it’s a montage look at how Santa actually carries off his impossible feat of visiting billions of children in a single night – the very conundrum that helped turn young Jack into a prepubescent Grinch. If you’ve ever wanted a plausible explanation for such patently ridiculous global coverage, Red One’s got that, too. Well, maybe not “plausible,” exactly – but like any good Christmas movie, Red One makes you believe just enough.
Red One is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.