“Red One” is a sour sugarplum of a Christmas treat, a cheerfully cynical action comedy for kids – especially the ones who asked Santa Claus for ninja stars and a Nerf gun. Director Jake Kasdan (“Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”) and screenwriter Chris Morgan (“Fast Five”) present their take on Santa as a muscle-bound alpha male (J.K. Simmons) who burns 430 million calories on his big night. “Got to carb up,” he says, cramming a cookie in his mouth.
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Macho Santa boasts a general’s strut and a president’s security detail, the latter headed up by a stone-faced Dwayne Johnson, whose character, Cal, is a humorless battle ELF. (Here, that stands for Enforcement, Logistics and Fortification.) Like everyone in the North Pole, Cal is stern and officious – although somewhere under that tight Spandex, he’s managed to wedge a thesaurus. Instead of describing himself as spreading joy to the world, Cal says he delivers packages to “several billion individual domiciles.” When Cal says “good tidings,” it sounds like a threat.
This Christmas is – cliché alert! – Cal’s one last job before retiring at age 542. He no longer believes in the mission, which is to say he no longer believes in humanity. For the first time, there are more names on the naughty list than the nice list. (You, too, may agree.)
Take Jack (Chris Evans), a mercenary, hacker and human grinch. In his first sequence, he glowers at an infant sucking on a lollipop. Given the hyperbolized tone, I was genuinely shocked the script (from a story by Hiram Garcia) stopped short of Jack stealing candy from a baby. A beat later, he came back and swiped it.
Things go wrong. Jack must save Christmas – a sentiment so earnest, his character chokes when forced to say it out loud. At the start, the movie is so hell-bent on getting the audience on board with its serious, supercool Santa that, between fast-paced references to acronyms and treaties and hydroponic mistletoe, we can’t figure out when we’re allowed to laugh. But around the time Cal and Jack go on a snowman-killing spree in Aruba, we’re finally allowed to have as much fun in this world as Kasdan and Morgan clearly did creating it.
Visual gags and clever ideas zip by: snow globes handled like they’re filled with plutonium; an 18-foot, shape-shifting ogre cloaked in the skin of a defenseless-looking petite blonde (Kiernan Shipka); shrink rays that miniaturize Johnson and embiggen Hot Wheels to a drivable size. What, we wonder, is Cal’s plan when he pockets a Slinky along with the Hot Wheels? It never comes up. But the looseness feels refreshing – a nod to the kind of giddy, sloppy 1980s flick this wants to be, a child-pleaser that will live on forever in a back bedroom while the grown-ups do their boring adult chitchat on the living room couch.
Too many films have become so tightly plotted, so bound up by their own narrative ribbons, so tediously obedient to manuals on how to write a movie, so overly honed by the anti-plot-hole committee, that the act of watching them has lost all surprise. Accustomed to that, Slinky went on my mental checklist. So did Jack’s missing father. (Don’t let it be Santa, I begged.) Happily, the end credits rolled with both items uncrossed.
The look of the film is all over the place, from chintzy CG reindeer to a flat backdrop of a cemetery that looks so distractingly cheap that its nothingness draws attention to itself. The penny-pinching pays off with one great splurge: a fantastic party sequence at a castle in Germany where Krampus (a hilarious Kristofer Hivju) and all his bizarro guests appear to be practically made costumed monsters, with their special-effects horns sprouting from all sorts of places horns shouldn’t. Imagine a holiday shindig at the Mos Eisley cantina. It’s marvelous.
Having won us over, the film implies there are even more storybook tales to testosteronize. Cal’s boss, Zoe (Lucy Liu), oversees everything mythological, including the Headless Horseman and the Easter Bunny. Thankfully, we won’t have to see Johnson play the Tooth Fairy – he’s already done it – but, for now, I remain unconvinced that we need a sequel where he wrestles a giant chocolate egg.
RATING: *** OUT OF FOUR