Red One

Directed by Jake Kasdan, Red One details the chaos that unfolds after Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) is abducted from the North Pole mere days before Christmas – with the narrative following Santa’s head of security (Dwayne Johnson’s Callum Drift) as he and a miscreant hacker (Chris Evans’ Jack O’Malley) team up for a dangerous rescue mission. It’s almost inherently appealing subject matter that’s slowly-but-surely squandered by Kasdan, as the filmmaker, armed with a script by Chris Morgan, delivers a progressively intolerable endeavor that’s been suffused with a whole host of often aggressively ineffective attributes and elements – with the ongoing reliance on woefully underwhelming instances of computer-generated special effects perpetuating the movie’s glossy, disposable feel. There’s little doubt, as well, that Red One‘s arms-length atmosphere is compounded by a distressingly sluggish midsection rife with padded-out and downright needless sequences (eg there’s a completely pointless interlude set within Krampus’ dingy lair that goes on forever), while the overblown, action-heavy climax ensures that the whole thing concludes on as anticlimactic (and thoroughly tiresome) a note as one could possibly envision – thus confirming the picture’s place as a hopelessly misguided debacle that squanders a legitimately promising setup.

* out of ****