MOVIE REVIEW: RED ONE

Despite its flat plot and title, Red One, co-starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, glimmers. Adapting producer Hiram Garcia’s story, Chris Morgan, who wrote the taut Chris Evans debut Cellular in 2004, with director Jake Kasdan pulls off an entertaining, thoughtful and poignant Christmas movie. Take the picture as is—an Amazon movie stitched to formula by an Evans-Johnson team from Jumanji, as well as San Andreas and Skyscraper, films. Enjoy the ride.

Evans as a wisecracking wastrel, thief and scoundrel taking candy from a baby caps a foundational plot scene, which sets a redemptive tone. Evans’s character, an absent dad introduced as a chubby killjoy in an opening flashback, swipes a tot’s sucker. This action’s left offscreen. Like an Amazon.com delivery, everything happens fast without regard for finer points, let alone artistry. Red One (the title’s Santa’s code name) might’ve been better than this. That it isn’t doesn’t diminish its charm. With Evans as a drifter who sells Santa Claus out, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson enters as security commander at the North Pole.

J.K. Simmons (Whiplash) appears as Santa Claus with Bonnie Hunt (Jumanji) as his wife. Lucy Liu also appears in what looks like a wig with bangs. Throughout the computer-generated action film, milk and cookies play a role as Johnson and Evans intersperse mythological world building with realism in pursuit of rescuing the taken Saint Nicholas. At the cloaked North Pole, depicted as an Amazon distribution center meets a gleaming industrialist city devoid of culture and life, a curiously shapeshifting multiculturalism cum segregationism reigns. Why does Johnson’s—or Liu’s—mythical character take that human form? Why does the villainess choose to appear as a blonde woman? Why are the reindeer female?—with no sign of Rudolph’s red nose in Red One—and why are the villainess’s kids all dark-skinned while the baddies gathered at a rogue rave party resemble Star Wars aliens? Woke or non-woke pandering confuses and detracts.

Otherwise, Red One thrives on inventive focus on seeing the inner child. With clever—which could’ve been intelligent—dichotomies, Morgan flirts with ingenious plot-theming. For example, there’s old/young interplay between fit, wise Santa and Johnson’s jaded guardian—also an insecure/secure contrast between lone wolf-freelancer dad Evans with Johnson’s childless man of self-confidence—besides a warrior-witch dichotomy and an excellent, if implicit, distinction between being good and being “nice,” as against tracking who’s naughty and nice.

Whether you can look within to see your own inner child—and keep company with those who see your inner child—is the primary value of Red One, which Amazon prematurely pre-scheduled for streaming at the expense of its box office profit, driven by strong paying audience response and reviews (it’s a hit in theaters).

With the North Pole as capitalist winter utopia, a musical son named Dylan, the profit motive in Evans character exchange with Liu’s boss, Christmas songs cleverly seeded into key scenes and the snow globe as metaphor for rationalism and over-compartmentalization, Red One’s fatherhood-fabled theme of man as a volitional being—dramatizing with masculine vigor, vulnerability and humor that one can choose to be good—resonates with playfulness, pride and joy. “I know I can do better,” a character says in pronouncing Red One’s theme. The skill of seeing a the child within as being crucial to realizing one’s potential virtue stays on track toward Christmas Eve. Let the happy, peaceful delivery begin with those first two words—“I know”—and, in this surprisingly, poignantly cheerful and moving Christmas film, let it be like receiving a gift which is well-deserved.