‘Red One’ or — Santa ‘Baws’?

“Sweet Jesus Christ,” I groaned to myself halfway through ‘Red One’ (2024) this morning. “I haven’t been this bored since the last time I watched ‘Out of Africa’ (1985) or listened to The Eagles.” And being boring is the least of ‘Red One’s crimes as it’s also inherently stupid, conceptually witless, needlessly crass and philosophically offensive.

The “idea” behind it is that Santa Claus (J. K. Simmons) is real and runs his base at the North Pole like some sort of highly advanced military operation. When security is breached and Santa is kidnapped it’s up to his bodyguard, Callum Drift (The Rock), and naughty-lister cyber hacker, Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), to rescue Santa before Christmas arrives or the audience loses the will to live. Whichever occurs first, although I can assure you it was definitely the latter.

So as you can tell, it’s trying to be a Christmas movie and an action flick but it fails at both because its internal logic is so convoluted and childish it can’t generate any wonder or excitement so has to resort to constantly pulling a series of increasingly ridiculous shit out of its ass like a veterinarian teasing mint flavoured dental floss from a naughty labrador’s anus. At one point Chris Evans attempts to explain to his son what’s going on… and finds that he can’t! So if the characters in the movie itself can’t figure out what the hell is going on then what chance do the poor bastards in the cinema watching it have?

Although what really sticks in the craw is the sense we’re watching nothing but a giant advert. This isn’t about Christmas — it’s about The Rock scrambling to salvage his career which, ironically, would’ve made for a vastly more interesting movie if that’s what this film was actually about. It’s also a massive advert for Amazon, the studio behind it, so we see brightly coloured flying drones gracefully carrying gifts whilst happy workers scuttle to-and-fro in dazzling warehouses as though they’re in some form of glorious utopia and not some nightmarish hell-hole on minimum wage. It’s a blatant attempt by a multinational corporation to insinuate itself into our affections, and that was the point I wanted to set fire to the cinema screen.

Then there’s all the product placement, the endless scenes in toy shops looking at Hot Wheels and the “Well, of COURSE that’s got to be in there!” close-up of a bottle of The Rock’s tequila, which might be the very first object we see in the movie. This isn’t even free advertising but what we’re actually paying to look at.

Apart from all that it’s nothing more than enduring The Rock and Evans lurch from one pointless episode to the next whilst spouting inane dialogue from a script that doesn’t so much insult your intelligence as assume you don’t possess any to begin with.

But, most notable of all, it seems The Rock has finally lived up to his name as seeing him up on-screen so lifeless, inert and devoid of charisma it became immediately apparent I wasn’t witnessing a human being engaged in the art of acting but a lump of sedimentary material undergoing the irreversible process of geological diagenesis and metamorphosis into a terminal state of igneous crystallisation. That’s the only possible explanation for what I saw this morning.

‘Red One’ isn’t a movie but the distasteful mingling of consumerism, capitalism and disposable culture. We have brought this on ourselves. This is what happens when we fail to listen to Gramsci.