Red One’s Instant Bamboozle

The teaming-up of Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson and Chris Evans in Red One smacks of the “Avengers, assemble!” rallying cry. Any sentient moviegoer might cringe. It recalls the instant bamboozle we just saw in the celebrity endorsements of Kamala Harris (with almost every actor from the Marvel Cinematic Universe reuniting to do a campaign ad), so we are within our rights to be wary.

The title riffs on those Secret Service code names for U.S. presidents — Lancer for JFK, Searchlight for Nixon, Renegade for Obama, Mogul for Trump, and now Red One, a comical moniker for Santa Claus (played by J. K. Simmons), who travels with a motorcade and even has his own chariot version of The Beast. Alluding to espionage action, Santa has been kidnapped and can be rescued only by experienced cynics equipped with their own cool video-game names: Johnson is Callum Drift, head of the North Pole security team Enforcement, Logistics, and Fortification (ELF); Evans is Jack O’Malley, a swaggering computer hacker who is on the naughty list as a lifelong skeptic and deadbeat dad.

Director Jake Kasdan, of Johnson’s Jumanji franchise, and screenwriter Chris Morgan, of the Fast & Furious franchise, embrace their usual, by now exhausted, pandering formula in the spirit of Hollywood greed. Working against traditional Christmas sentimentality, they make jolly, generous Santa into a gym rat, but not so buff-and-tough that he can’t be abducted by bad elements more cynical than Cal and Jack. It takes an MCU knock-off, Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu), of the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority (MORA), to direct the recovery mission, taking the movie into Peter Jackson–Zack Snyder territory. Cal and Jack go up against freaky, nightmare creatures including Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), Christmas Witch Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), a bad-ass talking polar bear named Garcia (Reinaldo Faberlle), and a league of giant, vicious Jack Frost snowmen.

The film’s rollicking set pieces increase the potential for the sale of stocking-stuffer action figures. The film’s use of toy stores as portal stations for the North Pole transit system recalls the materialism of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Jingle All the Way — and CG-enhanced F/X of the Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots and a Transformer-brand car are always fun. But Red One’s alternative holiday fantasy doesn’t improve on the replacement-theory gothic of Tim Burton’s wretched The Nightmare Before Christmas or the unaccountably popular Elf.

The overload of seasonal gimmicks is revolting and tiresome — as if Guardians of the Galaxy has set the template for entertainment. Atheist Hollywood co-opts the holidays with no intention of providing edification. Johnson and Evans, formerly agreeable screen hunks, devote themselves to such mercenary interests that they regard action-movie fans as a new breed of yahoo morons, no longer satiated by fast-paced chase scenes and demolition-derby car crashes but needing to get high on snark. (When The Rock was hinting at a political career, the joke was that he had become The Pebble. Now he’s a lump of coal.) In Red One, Johnson and Evans present themselves as low-class vicarious stars — champions of the new political surrogacy. This problem comes to a head with the upcoming Wicked. Until then, Red One is Wicked for boys.

Christmas movies with a human touch, as recent as Noel, The Family Stone, and All Is Bright, are as far from Millennial imagination as Meet Me in St. Louis (1945) and Remember the Night (1939). It makes sense that Red One opens right after the election when celebrity performers like Johnson and Evans have openly befouled themselves and revealed their venal motives. Wonder what a totally secular-minded Christmas would be like? Red One answers with a smirk.