The North Pole has fallen and Santa’s been red-napped in a good-humoured festive action flick. Here’s our Red One review.
They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore. After watching the festive PR car-crash that’s followed Jake Kasdan’s original action-adventure blockbuster, it’s not hard to see why.
First, Red One’s December 2023 release was pushed back by nearly a year, reportedly due to the SAG-AFTRA strike which began a full five months after shooting had wrapped. Then, a bombshell The Wrap article alleged Dwayne Johnson ballooned the film’s budget by turning up to set seven-to-eight hours late – allegations Kasdan and producer Hiram Garcia have both strenuously denied, but not before Johnson’s “hardest-worker-on-set” reputation disappeared halfway down the bottles he inexplicably pees in.
Six months on from Johnson-gate, the world’s sharpest pens feel poised for a stinker – if they’re even poised at all. One of the stranger quirks of spending $250m on a film starring Captain America and The Rock is that your cinema blockbuster starts to look a lot like Netflix’s Red Notice and The Gray Man – neither of which proved much of a hit with critics. Despite the bus adverts careening around major city streets for the last month, almost everyone seems convinced the film’s a straight-to-streaming release. Warner Bros, which is distributing the film internationally, must be miffed.
Especially because, despite all the signs, Red One is perfectly entertaining – at times, very much so. I know, I’m as shocked as you are.
Then again, it’s not like director Jake Kasdan needs to prove his credentials. His reboot of the beloved Jumanji franchise turned what could have been a cynical cash-grab into a pair of the best family adventure movies of the last decade. Reuniting with Johnson, now with an entirely original (unless Santa counts as IP) idea to play with, Red One feels like exactly the sort of blockbuster we should be cheering from the rooftops. And, for the most part, it is.
Reimagining the North Pole as a super-modern metropolis, the film finds JK Simmons’ Saint Nick kidnapped days before Christmas Eve, leaving his head of security, Callum Drift (Johnson) and unscrupulous hacker-for-hire, Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) to track him down. Along the way, they’ll face down all manner of chilly ne’er-do-wells taken from centuries of Christmas mythology, and throw plenty of people through tables. They might even learn the true meaning of Christmas along the way – chance would be a fine thing.
Originally intended as the start of an inter-connected universe reinventing various bits of holiday canon, there’s an entertaining twinkle in the film’s world-building that feels particularly refreshing coming from an original pitch. In this world, Simmons’ Father Christmas feels more like an action-movie POTUS than a jolly red giant, and his employees move from place to place through magical doors built into the back rooms of toy shops. There are people in suits – real, rubbery, latex-y suits! – playing a bunch of obscure Christmas characters, all of which show off a degree of imagination blockbuster fantasy seems to have lost recently.
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Throughout, Johnson does exactly what Johnson usually does – the world-weary hard man with a heart of gold, doing one last job before the exhausting length of Santa’s naughty list forces him into retirement. Evans, meanwhile, does what Evans does best when he’s not throwing rare metal plates all over the place. In another life, his on-screen persona could have stuck as everyone’s favourite loveable scoundrel – an early scene sees Captain America quite literally steal candy from a baby, and he’s clearly having a lot of fun doing it.
Our odd couple’s respective arcs might be visible from space, but there’s a subtle, almost-nuanced turn to the script that just about avoids making Red One feel too schmaltzy. It might not leave you in a flood of festive tears, but it does feel Christmas-y – and that’s no small feat in a two-hour action blockbuster. Kasdan is clearly having a blast throwing various stuntpeople (and, just as often, Chris Evans) through some very shoddily put-together furniture, and the result feels pleasingly physical.
Unfortunately, that only makes the straight-to-streaming look of some of the visual effects work stand out more. You’d think $250m would at the very least get you a top-of-the-range green screen, but Red One frequently looks worse than Kasdan’s previous Jumanji outings while costing as much as the two of them combined. In the seven years since Welcome To The Jungle graced cinemas, the reported budgets of these sorts of films have spiraled while the VFX work has only gotten shoddier. Not for the first time, it has to make you wonder: what the hell happened?
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But while the last act might descend into a shoddy-looking jumpy-crashy-smashy fest on a studio backlot, the preceding hour-and-a-half stores up enough goodwill that it shouldn’t matter too much. Red One might do little to reinvent the runner (that’s the bit of a sled that touches the ice; I’m doing a festive joke), but is that what we want from a Christmas film? Kasdan’s made what should by all rights be a solid holiday hit – an entertaining family action movie with big stars and a cheeky sense of humour. Don’t let the behind-the-scenes drama put you off an uncontroversial crowd-pleaser.
Red One arrives in UK cinemas on 6th November.
