Red One

Jake Kasdan, the son of legendary Lucasfilm scribe and notable ’80s auteur Lawrence Kasdan, began his own filmmaking career with promise. Jake’s debut as writer-director, 1998’s Zero Effect, a loose modern-day adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes tale, holds up well despite not getting noticed in its initial release. After work on Judd Apatow’s landmark but short-lived TV series “Freaks & Geeks” and “Undeclared”, the younger Kasdan returned to the big screen as the director of Orange County (2002), which is as good as millennial MTV teen movies get. In 2007, Kasdan made good on the promise by giving us not one but two of the best films of the year, decade, and, heck, quarter-century: The TV Set, a behind-the-scenes satire inspired by his experiences on the Apatow shows, and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, an uproarious parody of musician biopics that shows up every true, straight-faced entry to that genre.

Creatively, Kasdan was thriving. Commercially, mid-range January performer Orange County was his biggest hit. That changed with Bad Teacher, a for-hire gig that grossed ten times its modest budget in the summer of 2011. Kasdan tried to repeat that success three summers later by reuniting with Bad Teacher stars Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel. Sex Tape turned a profit, but was generally disliked. Then came the 2017 reboot Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Kasdan’s first tentpole, an effects-laden big budget extravaganza that earned nearly $1 billion worldwide.

While a common mantra in Hollywood is “one for them, one for me”, the Jumanji experience seems to have changed Kasdan and not for the better. He returned for 2019’s inevitable sequel Jumanji: The Next Level, upgrading from executive producer to producer and adding the screenplay to his duties. That movie grossed over $800 million worldwide in what would be the last big moviegoing season for years when the COVID pandemic came just a few months later.

The pandemic is over, moviegoing is back (kind of), and the types of movies with which Kasdan began his career are no longer made, at least not for anything but streaming services. So perhaps it’s not a huge surprise that Kasdan’s ninth and latest time in the director’s chair is another for-hire, big budget tentpole reuniting him with Dwayne Johnson. Filmed over four months from 2022-2023, Red One finally makes it to theaters a year later than expected with a staggering reported budget of around $250 million.

Christmas movies can be lucrative business. Look at how much money Elf, Jim Carrey’s Grinch and even The Polar Express made. I have no doubt the powers that be looked at those box office figures when deciding how much to spend on Red One. I am less certain they looked closely at the ideas in the screenplay by Fast & Furious veteran Chris Morgan and story by Johnson’s friend and ex-brother-in-law Hiram Garcia. I’m sure someone, somewhere can justify spending a quarter of a billion dollars on a big splashy holiday season attraction. But this has to be some of the most convoluted and hard-sell holiday lore since DreamWorks Animation’s Rise of the Guardians a dozen years ago.

After a seemingly ’90s prologue establishes one of our leads, the movie opens in earnest at an ordinary shopping mall in the present day, where Santa Claus (a characteristically bald and inexplicably fit J.K. Simmons) is dealing with the usual kid gift requests along with some off-putting wannabe influencer shtick and adult shoppers being pushy and unpleasant. With naughtiness on the rise across the board, the world today is bumming out Cal Drift (Johnson), Santa’s longtime right-hand man and head of security. Cal has just resigned from his position and though Santa accepts that, he does not welcome it.

Apparently, security is a top priority for Santa in this high-tech and cold, complex version of the North Pole. When the not-so big man in red goes missing, Cal is determined to find him. The department’s efficient sleuthing soon brings Cal to Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), the grown-up version of the industrious, cynical boy of the prologue. Jack has slimmed down, but he still remains unscrupulous. We’re repeatedly told he’s a Level 4 on the Naughty List, which seems to be a big deal to Cal. Unbeknownst to him, Jack’s for-hire hacking work of tracking flight activity has enabled Santa’s kidnapping. Now, this deadbeat divorced dad/mildly degenerate gambler has to use his skills to team up with Cal, find Santa, and save Christmas.

To their credit, Morgan and Garcia spare us the traditional North Pole portrayals we’ve seen a hundred times before. The writers strive to make Red One a bona fide action movie. At times, it seems like they aimed for action comedy, but they struggle with the second part of that phrase. Many of the sporadic jokes fall flat, even at my amped, packed, and suitably festive advance screening.

The years since Avengers: Endgame have shown us the limitations of Chris Evans’ charm. He could land a laugh as one focal cog in the giant Marvel machine and did so again with his subversive return in this summer’s smash Deadpool & Wolverine. But severed from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Evans has struggled to entertain, doing little to justify handsome paydays in overpriced streamer fodder The Gray Man, Ghosted, and Pain Hustlers. Red One at least returns Evans to the big screen, giving him his first live-action theatrical lead role since pre-pandemic hit Knives Out. But once again, he plays a character tough to empathize with, occasionally trying out a broad New York accent you’d expect to hear in a community theatre play.

Johnson is no better. It’s not even controversial to point out that the former wrestler is not much of an actor and that he has barely ever made a good film (Moana voiceover and The Other Guys cameo, excluded). But he’s been one of the biggest and best-paid movie stars around for years simply because he’s charismatic and good-looking. That signature charisma is missing here, as Johnson plays the part of Cal like he’s reading reports of DC dropping his Black Adam followed by embarrassing insider accounts of consistent, costly on-set tardiness and bottled urination. At 52, the actor remains in terrific shape for any age, but his performance here is so lifeless. You’d think earning $50 million for four months of playful, come-as-you-please work would bring you a little bit of joy, but you’d find more enthusiasm in your nearest fast food joint’s employees than you get from Johnson’s disengaged work here.

Admittedly, no one is seeing Red One to discover what Johnson brings to the role of Cal Drift dramatically. He’s apparently taking acting seriously in A24 and Benny Safdie’s 2025 Mark Kerr biopic The Smashing Machine. Perhaps that is what he needs to cure the doldrums he displays as Cal.

For being a comedy in theory, Red One takes a lot of its ridiculousness quite seriously. There’s the upright polar bear ELF agent Garcia, an ice cream truck of violent and menacing snowman, and a Krampus slap fight presented like an underground bare-knuckled boxing brawl. Why invent such farcical absurdity and then not, you know, play it for laughs? Why keep throwing in expensive visuals and set pieces that add nothing to the experience? These are great questions for Johnson’s ex brother-in-law, Morgan, Kasdan, and the bean counters to answer.

It’s disheartening for Kasdan’s career to play out as it has, devolving from this sharp, witty, original storyteller to simply a well-paid mindless studio spectacle overseer. This is his worst film to date and any glimmers of it avoiding that fate tend to emanate from the cast’s lone Oscar winner Simmons, who is extensively sidelined for most of the picture. While Red One is sure to finally dethrone the Venom threequel from its three-week perch atop the box office, it has a long, long way to go until profitability and with an expected $30 million debut, that may well never happen.