Red One: When the Jolly Old Elf has a Private Army and State-of-the-Art Military Tech

By Jim Slotek

Rating: C

Santa Claus still comes to town this time each year, usually to sell things, but is his mythology relevant to kids in 2024?

Studio execs must lose some sleep over it, or they wouldn’t pour huge resources into projects like Red One, Santa Claus militarized as Tom Clancy would have imagined him, aided by the inspirational detritus of everything from Harry Potter to Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars.

And starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as the muscle, er, head elf, who answers to Commander Zoe (Lucy Liu).

Krampus and Cal (Dwayne Johnson) face off over the fate of Santa.

A non-stop action movie with just enough plot to stitch together more action scenes, Red One is as soullessly fast and furious as you’d expect from scripter Chris Morgan of Fast & Furious franchise fame. It posits an arctic Santa’s workshop with gnomes (or something) that look like some of the cuter creatures in the Star Wars universe and a lovable Wookie - er, I mean polar bear, and with its own military command operating under a cloaking dome that Superman might have used to hide his Fortress of Solitude.

Santa – played by a buff J.K. Simmons - has all this at his disposal, and the assistance of the U.S. military in his annual global magic act of delivering presents (cutting-edge technology and magic kind of overlap here).

The plot? On the day of his supersonic reindeer-assisted sleighride, Santa is kidnapped by parties unknown. So, the entire military industrial complex of Santa’s workshop city (which sometimes seems like a hybrid of Wakanda and Blade Runner’s L.A. with snow) is on the case, fronted by Callum Drift (Johnson), the head of E.L.F., who has begun to doubt his mission in life because the “naughty” list has become longer than the “nice” list. (He just noticed this now?).

(On a tangential note, the last movie I recall about Santa being kidnapped was 1964’s Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Just as silly on a thousandth of the budget.)

Case in point: hacker/bounty-hunter/bad-dad Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), who turns out to have been hired by the bad guys to locate Santa’s secret city, and who is a Level IV Naughty.

Forced to team up with Cal, the two set off to battle monsters-of-interest, including Krampus (Kristofer Hijvu) and a witch named Gryla (Kiernan Shipka) who believes that Santa doesn’t go far enough to punish the naughty and incongruously plans to do it with an act of extreme naughtiness.

As for Santa, he spends most of the movie in a coma, which is a pretty good state to be in, all things considered. Tough gig for Simmons.

Much of this plays out as if it was made up as it goes along, with new monsters – including literal abominable snowmen – popping up in each scene. (There is admittedly one quick, clever scene involving Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots). It’s possible this is enough to capture the eyeballs of young children in this day and age, but my sense is, beyond age 9, they’re a tougher audience for gratuitous CGI than you might expect.

As for saccharine endings (spoiler alert: the meaning of Christmas is being nice), that may be the point where they pick up their smartphones.

Red One. Directed by Jake Kasdan. Starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans and Lucy Liu. Opens Friday, November 15.