A Dreadful Holiday Chore | Red One (2024) Movie Review
Anchored to — and sunk by — the beefiest neck-albatross in cinema history ⚓
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A slight correction. Upon further review, this Nicole Kidman PSA about the magic of cinema and feeling feelings you can only feel at the movies or some such… it comes at the END of the trailers, acting as a sort of portal or gateway to the Narnia of Film, and it’s also when the remaining house lights come down and it’s gametime for movies: movietime.
It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I’ve included a screenshot with the text overlaid, and this is the perfect encapsulation of what this whole presentation is giving:
It’s even weirder than I’m making it sound. And Kidman — the consummate professional — is giving one hundred and ten percent when fifteen would do. But Kidman is a treasure* and I have nothing bad to say about her or even about this preview clip, except that it’s bizarre.
* despite her dodgy, where-exactly-ARE-you-from, vaguely-Mid-Atlantic (Mid-Pacific?) accent, she is definitely an Aussie national treasure, and unlike, say, your Gibsons-Mel or your Seriouses-Yahoo, they’re happy to claim her
Yeah, you know this guy. He’s Marc Evan Jackson. On The Good Place (one of the best television shows ever, I think, and one of the most profound and substantive), he plays Shawn. I am literally always glad to see this guy show up in anything (he’s like a Paul F. Tompkins in that way), and I’m so chuffed by it, I’m skeeting the good news.
Against all odds, this movie managed to build and stockpile some goodwill in the shoe-leather, nuts-and-bolts opening moments. Everything about this movie feels very calculated (movies don’t ever happen by accident, to be fair), but at this point, it felt so certain to be bad that I’m hoping to gain some insight into how the calculations went so woefully awry.
When a film is so nakedly a cash-grab — or, put another way, the further and further you detectably get from true or purposeful artistic vision — then it’s way, way fairer to judge its success or failure based solely on its box-office numbers.
I’ll put it this way — this movie is over NO ONE’s head. Of all the people who don’t like this movie (and to be sure, very soon there will be WAY more people who don’t remember that this was a movie), Red One was over none of their heads. It was aimed at the lowest-common-denominator, so its quality lives and dies with its results.
To that end!
I will have some preproduction- and production-related theories as we go, and the first one that occurred to me was that there’s some sort of unspoken Hollywood-math occurring here. Let’s say I’m a producer making this film (and this film’s creative processes — such as they were — were entirely driven by producers and money; they must be, I have to assume):
So I’m thinking, like, let’s pretend I’m a producer and my fat, rapey, gross Hollywood boss (I presume) says, ‘make this; it’s got The Rock, what used to be Chris Evans, JK Simmons looking like he’s fresh off a Chicago meatpacking plant assembly line, Lucy Liu who has promised to do two kicks, plus the rights to Santa are public domain. Get to work.’
Harbingers of Ill Portent
So for the first 15ish minutes, this movie did nothing but build up goodwill — I had the impression of a squirrel furiously burying nuts for the upcoming winter, and to be sure, Winter was Coming.
It’s Dwayne Johnson. He’s the Winter, and BOY, was he Coming.
He is so anticharismatic that watching him in scenes with anyone else is like the cinematic equivalent of those James Webb Telescope images of a black hole eating a star, just ripping their Rizz to tiny shreds and gobbling it up, and meanwhile not one iota of Rizz can escape, even traveling at the speed of Rizz.
I like to think of the director or producers huddled up at Video Village watching dailies and saying, “Jesus, this is bad. The Rock is making everyone else around him actively worse, plus his piss bottles keep sneaking into shots.”
And so the solution is to pair him not with other actors, which is bad for everyone, but with a big cartoon polar bear, who looks about as photorealistic as Baloo from Disney’s 1967 animated classic The Jungle Book, but with absolutely none of the charm, character, personality or creative effort that made Baloo to this day one of my best imaginary friends.
You know the photo. I couldn’t find any decent versions of it on Google (because Google has become terrible in the last two-three years), but he was working out so hard for THIS movie. Ages ago, btw, which speaks to the lengthy post-production process and just the inertia surrounding this whole project (since it’s driven only by desires for profit, there’s no drive or forward progression from a creative or a creative’s vision).
It’s antithetical to Santa. This movie about Santa doesn’t get Santa, AT ALL.
And yes, obviously, I know that Santa is a fictional character. But as a fictional character, he’s no less real than James Bond or Batman, and is arguably much more so. So, in order to successfully write a story or make a movie about Santa, you’ve got to get Santa.
This commercial, below, played during the trailers for Kraven the Hunter (which I saw the following day), and I would argue this commercial also doesn’t get Santa, but it gets Santa better than Red One.
Zack Snyder’s Santa Claus
The Rock plays a character named (and I wish I were making this up so badly), “Callum Drift.” Not for nothing, Chris Evans plays “Jack O’Malley,” which had as little thought put into it, but is less offensively dumb.
Everything about this film is offensively dumb. It is the living embodiment of PG-13, so everyone says, ‘shit’ every four seconds, but there is only one ‘fuck.’ It’s as sweatily manufactured and bad as it sounds. It’s edgy for the sake of being edgy, but only as edgy as PG-13 gets (not very).
Lampshading is a common writing trope/term, and while it’s not innately or inherently bad, it is often a bad sign. It means to have one of the characters in the story call attention to something the viewer would otherwise be skeptical of, and by doing so, get the audience on their side and — hopefully — breeze right past the story element.
The story element they’re breezing past here is how unlikable The Rock is in everything he does. Chris Evans calls it out early on by saying The Rock’s Callum Drift is ‘not likable.’ He isn’t. But calling it out doesn’t soften the blow in this movie. He stays distinctly unlikable and unpleasant for the film’s entire runtime, a way-too-long 123 minutes.
The way the film deals with this is by having all the other characters also think The Rock sucks, and it emphatically does. not. work.
Nothing about this movie works, on any level. Everyone good is worse for being in it, and it manages to bring out the worst in The Rock (Moana 2, by comparison, manages to mitigate its The Rock problem deftly, partly aided by the fact he never has to appear on camera).
I don’t think anyone needs to go to jail over the creative processes here (the financial processes? jury’s still out on that one, literally), but everyone affiliated with this is tainted by it, in my opinion.
We have a saying in Texas. Maybe you have it where you’re from. Once bitten… once you bite, or get bitten… we can’t get fooled again.
Wikipedia says Red One is the, ‘first of a Christmas-themed action film franchise.’ Don’t be fooled — this is as far as this franchise gets, unless my opinion of Hollywood is somehow too high.
