Christmas is on the horizon and is one of many people's favourite times of year, myself included. Naturally with the holidays also come new holiday movies, some good like last year's The Holdovers and some bad like the new Netflix rom-com Hot Frosty (which yes is about a sexy snowman who comes to life). If you don't want to sit at home though and want to take your kids for some Christmas cheer in theatres, you have Red One, or hopefully a rerun of a classic.
I went into Red One frankly expecting the worst, and while it is in all honesty a bad movie, it is nowhere near the train wreck I expected it to be. Starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, and boasting a frankly ridiculous budget, this is sure to be a financial flop, but there are certainly worse things to take your kids to see nowadays.
The film follows Cal (Johnson), who is essentially Santa's right hand man. When Santa (a very buff J.K. Simmons) is captured, Cal and his team enlist the help of the bounty hunter that unknowingly started the chain of events Jack (Evans) to help find the man in red before time runs out on Christmas Eve.
This is simply put, a dumb movie. It's the kind of plot that feels conjured by a computer following a formula designed to make money. Granted, thanks to the budget I don't see it making much of any. Perhaps my biggest issue here is how drawn out the story is. While I didn't hate my time watching it, this has no business being over two hours long, and in its stretched out length there are a handful of plot points that are given almost zero time to shine. One subplot in particular involves the son of Chris Evans' character who feels completely shoehorned in just to make this feel a bit more like a traditional family Christmas movie. Kiernan Shipka plays the villain Gryla, and if we're being honest she's the main reason I decided to see this (I adore her as an actress), and while her performance is decent, the character has almost no development and isn't on screen nearly enough.
The Rock and Chris Evans are perfectly fine in the lead roles. They're both very much playing to type, especially Johnson, but both clearly have leading-man talent and they play off of each other fairly well. Lucy Liu is shoehorned in and is fine, J.K. Simmons is honestly great in limited time, and Kristofer Hivju as Krampus is awesome thanks to some pretty solid makeup effects. The makeup and hair is actually quite great, but unfortunately a lot of the creatures are done through weak CGI instead. The effects as a whole here are pretty weak which wound up taking me out of things quite a bit. If it looked good I would be okay with it, but we've seen so many beautiful Christmas movies and terrific practical versions of the North Pole, but this is just a bit of a visual mess.
I don't hate this at all. It's a perfectly watchable Christmas movie with a lot of stars you'll love. The story is contrived and messy and it doesn't look great, but there's enough charm that it's perfectly watchable, just maybe wait until you can throw it up at home. 2/5
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