Red One (2024)
Taken outside of this context, it's a truly baffling film that tries to combine kid's fantasy with edgy language (this makes use of its PG-13 rating) and occasionally frightening situations. To be clear, this blend of tones could have worked in the right hands. It's not all that dissimilar an approach from del Toro's Hellboy movies, for example. But the rule of thumb when approaching fairytales from a more grownup perspective is to lean into the childlike wonder of the thing while delving into the darker implications of that genre. Horror has been exploring this territory for ages.
But Red One doesn't want to be horror, nor is it content with comedy or fantasy. Rather, it seems to be emulating spy flicks. The cinematography appears to be attempting to replicate the look (or at least color palette) of a Daniel Craig Bond film, or perhaps Fast & Furious installment (this feels a lot like a F&F movie, in fact - not too surprising given the number of individuals from that franchise involved, including writer Chris Morgan). Alternatively, you could look at this as an extension of some of the more visually bland superhero movies of the 2010s (think the first Suicide Squad).
In short, it wants to be a superspy Christmas action film, and appears to be buying into the myth that bright colors would undercut this effect. This of course leaves the production with a bland, muted appearance preventing the weirdness from being fun. Though, to be fair, a better design would only have fixed some of the surface-level problems.
The bulk of the movie's issues stem from pacing. This absolutely feels like it's a half-hour too long. Characters constantly restate ideas, presumably in case kids watching missed them the first time. Comedic sequences drag, as the leads banter humorlessly. Themes and lessons are expounded on, despite feeling empty and soulless. By the time we get to the action sequences (most of which are lackluster, anyway), there's not enough energy to sustain the audience.
And structurally this has one lead too many. Or more accurately, one POV character too many: Red One treats Dwayne Johnson's Callum Drift and Chris Evans's Jack O'Malley as co-leads and attempts to tell its story simultaneously from both their perspectives. Consequently, we're shown the North Pole and an extended chase sequence as Drift tries to prevent the abduction of Santa Claus before the movie gives us a generic sequence in which Jack is picked up by a top-secret organization and introduced to the reality of all this. So we know the movie's set in a world where fantasy is real, but we're expected to sit through a skeptic coming to terms with escalating supernatural beings (most of whom we've already met).
That top-secret organization, incidentally, isn't even the one Drift works for, but rather a separate agency run by Lucy Liu's Zoe, who the heroes reluctantly work with to rescue Nick. Why not just streamline this so the North Pole's internal security team (itself a sort of Secret Service/Black Ops group) run the investigation? Perhaps they hoped this would spin off into some sort of shared universe. Hell, the world this movie's set in is extremely similar to that of Universal's defunct Dark Universe. Zoe is, for all intents and purposes, adopting the role of Russell Crowe's Jekyll/Hyde, though The Mummy remake gave Crowe a chance to have a lot more fun with it. Zoe feels like the movie worried about a lack of positive female representation (for good reason) and tried to fix it through half-measures.
Instead they should probably have combined her character with Mrs. Claus, played here by Bonnie Hunt. She's not given much screentime, but Hunt manages to stand out as one of the film's few bright spots, selling the character's concern and determination. She does more with a brief expression than other characters manage with monologues. Granted, this would have reduced the number of relevant women to two from three (three and a quarter, if we're counting a handful of lines of dialogue given to Mary Elizabeth Ellis), but it might have opened up the possibility of giving at least one of them some sort of arc.
This is, in short, a bad movie. But as I said at the outset, it's a bad movie with a number of good elements. First, for all my issues with the pacing and most of the fight sequences, there are a couple that actually deliver something entertaining. The battle against Grylla's snowmen assassins offers a surprising jolt of suspense, both because of their eerie, horror inspired introduction and their weapons being reminiscent of Subzero from Mortal Kombat. The brief sequence in Krampus's castle was also fun: while the visual design and muted colors dragged the rest of the film back, it served the gothic aesthetic nicely. Similarly, I liked Callum's powerset: his ability to shrink worked well as a throwback to Moore's A Visit from St. Nicholas and kept at least a few of the fights from feeling entirely derivative. Likewise, the power to adjust the reality of toys and transform them into tools and weapons was both neat and in keeping with the premise. Granted, both of these were still a little derivative from the Ant-Man movies, but they weren't as derivative as everything else.
Oh, and I also liked the polar bear and penguin agents. They might not be all that original, but they were fun.
From a folklore standpoint, the movie is tough to summarize. This dropped in numerous references and bits of yuletide lore; everything from Santa's origins as a Greek saint to seeming nods towards the Wild Hunt. The most sustained elements, though, came from Gryla, the Yule Lads, and Krampus, and these weren't straightforward.
In all cases, the movie opts to take bits and pieces of mythology while recreating the rest. To be fair, this is what movies usually do with these characters, and in some ways Red One does a better job at least referencing original elements than most contemporary films. For example, unlike Krampus or A Christmas Horror Story, this acknowledges Christmas isn't the day Krampus is traditionally active, and the backstory (while pretty heavily reworked) at least involves him and Nicholas having worked together (hell, Krampus even heroically flies to the rescue at the end). But the movie reimagines him as Santa's adopted brother, which is a pretty big departure.
Meanwhile, Gryla and the Yule Lads have received a much larger makeover. First, she's now primarily described as a witch, and the film seems to draw her motivation more from figures traditionally associated with that term, such as Befana. Her and her children are also shapeshifters now, which is also new and mostly here to justify a few Secret Invasion style sequences (I almost feel sorry for the filmmakers, who would have plotted all this out before that show dropped last year). The ending, however, includes a sequence in which Gryla transforms into her "true self," which is a pretty accurate version of the mythological figure (the fight was boring, but I liked the visual).
I don't think it's inherently bad to revamp this sort of lore to suit a movie, so long as the product feels justified. I'm inclined to overlook both Krampus and A Christmas Horror Story mangling the lore to a much greater degree, because they're good movies. This doesn't earn the same leeway in my book.
Start to end, Red One is a failed attempt to find a tone and story. The emotional beats mostly fall flat - Callum's because the psuedo-philosophy they're anchored to is mostly nonsense (though I kind of like the bit about grown-ups still having kids inside of them), and Jack's because... well....
Okay, there's a lot wrong with Jack's story. First, he starts out unlikeable in ways that are difficult to get over. The movie wants to establish him as a modern Scrooge but makes the same mistake most modern Scrooge adaptations make: they make the character's sins so cartoonishly outlandish he no longer resembles us or anyone we know. Dickens wrote Scrooge as fun pre-transformation, and - while he was a greedy, selfish curmudgeon - he didn't impinge on anyone's rights or commit any crimes. Jack, on the other hand, literally steals candy from a baby on a whim after a heist.
A heist, I'll add, that's nowhere near as fun as the start of last year's much cheaper, far superior Naughty Nine. As we get to know him, his relationship with his son comes off as a combination of unbelievable and generic. The lessons he learns are the same we've seen countless parents learn in holiday movies before (mostly told in ways better than this). So when Jack magically transforms into a better person after a conversation with Callum around the end of Act 2, we feel nothing.
There's so much wrong with this movie, it's impossible to do more than scratch the surface. Perhaps a different director than Jake Kasdan could have instilled this with a sense of life or even magic. Not necessarily even a better director - this material feels more like it's up Shawn Levy's alley than Kasdan's, and both are similarly hit-or-miss. But Levy leans towards giving his movies a bigger than life operatic quality, which Kasdan tends to aim for something more grounded. In the absence of anyone better, this could have used a touch of the operatic.
Instead, they tried making something for everyone and wound up with a movie for no one. The comedy falls flat, most of the action is dull, the drama is childish, and it's too "edgy" to be shown to kids too young to realize they're watching something this bad. There are some good moments (for 250 million there damn well better be), but they're too few and far between to salvage the project. Frankly, the most interesting thing about Red One might be that it genuinely does feel like a stealth installment in the Dark Universe.
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