Ho Ho Oh No!
It’s a Jumanji Christmas with Amazon’s latest film Red One starring Dwayne Johnson, proving that studios are desperate for the next Christmas classic film. This year it’s Amazon’s turn with a 250 million dollar investment on a star-studded, effects-heavy action holiday adventure about Santa being kidnapped and needing a team of unlikely misfits to save him and Christmas itself. It’s a story we have seen before, albeit not on this scale. It’s easy to put a lot of likeable people in a film like Chris Evans, Dwayne Johnson, Lucy Liu and JK Simmons. It’s another thing to fill it with enough heart and humour to make it a holiday classic, regrettably, the latter is missing here resulting in an over-bloated mess that feels like it’s trying to be a movie, rather than actually being one.
You could point the finger at the director Jake Kasdan (Jumanji Welcome To The Jungle, Bad Teacher, Sex Tape) although his history of work shows he can handle comedy with emotion, it is nowhere to be found here. If ever there was a movie that used industry buzz words like “four quadrant” and “franchise potential” it was thrown around and forced upon the idea of this film.
The plot device of needing to “save Christmas” has been perfected with films like Elf, The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Grinch with magic, here it feels painfully generic to make it a blockbuster action flick, the magic gets lost in the spectacle and not even Chris Evans’s charm and chiselled chin can save it. Simmons does deliver a warmer Santa Claus as opposed to previous roles, but there is still something unsettling about him that doesn’t quite stick the landing. My excitement for seeing Lucy Liu in a blockbuster film again was quickly curbed as her character felt very one-note, this was also the case for Bonnie Hunt which feels like a complete waste of their talents.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some great action scenes in here, particularly with Dwayne Johnson who gets to do what he does best. He is basically Hobbes in Christmas leathers delivering what his audience has come to expect of him. An eyebrow raised here, a punch and kick there, it all rings true to his brand. The action does get lost in the overly CGI’ed mess that is the special effects here. The North Pole looks eerily similar to Atlantis in the Aquaman movie with a ridiculous amount of tech used that we have again seen before in better films like Disney’s Prep & Landing and Rise of the Guardians.
Red One is the perfect example of the biggest problems with taking a movie intended for a streaming service to the big screen. The quality we have come to expect from these films is on fine display here with a subpar story, an over-reliance on special effects and a star-studded cast who are meant to sell tickets to this all fail to deliver a Christmas classic. Having this movie released in cinemas in November where the impending Glicked crowd will easily wipe it out. Studios would do well to focus on making a great movie, rather than trying to force a franchise with “four quadrant appeal”. Time will tell if Dwayne Johnson can still pull an audience after coming off a recent string of failures like Black Adam, Skyscraper and DC Super Pets. It seems audiences are still not willing to shell out movie theatre prices for sub-par streaming content.
Red One is in cinemas now
