For many people, a familiar pastime in the weeks leading up to major winter holidays is gathering with family members and watching holiday movies, be they in a theater or on television. During the month of December, the Falls Free Press will return to our tradition of “The 12 Films of Christmas,” focusing on new holiday movies for the year 2024—a year that can still do with plenty of peace and joy. We will review each film, whether naughty or nice, and let you know where to watch.
As there have been a plethora of different versions of Santa Claus in media over the years, they have been accompanied by the different fantastical worlds in which he and his family and associates live. Tim Allen’s portrayal lives alongside the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny, while Miracle on 34th Street shows a Santa who is at home in the real world alongside the people of New York. No matter how out there a world of Christmas may be, it usually feels relatively normal for audiences to help them follow the story. This year’s theatrical bomb from Amazon Pictures, Red One, feels precisely the opposite of this.
In Red One, after Santa Claus (played by a supremely swole J.K. Simmons) is kidnapped on Christmas Eve, his head of North Pole security Callum Drift (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) teams up with a hacker who had sold the information of Santa’s coordinates to an anonymous buyer. The hacker, Jack O’Malley (played by America’s Captain, Chris Evans), has been a skeptic of the Santa legend and on the naughty list for quite some time. Jack faces issues with his son’s behavior, (apparently the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree), which make the duo of these characters a side story throughout the adventure.
They discover the kidnapper is none other than the Christmas witch, Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), who plans on enacting her own form of vengeance on all who’ve been naughty. To find her, Callum and Jack traverse the globe through toy store storage rooms and using technology from Marvel’s Ant-Man series.
The actual story in the film is exciting, and if written into a lower-budget B-movie production, audiences may not have thought twice about reviews. Sadly, the film premiered in theaters 2 weeks before Thanksgiving, earning only $32 million in its opening weekend, with a budget of over $200 million. Part of why I believe the film was panned by many reviewers at the time is the film’s overall imagery. While even on a far worse television the odd computer-generated atmosphere may appear off putting, in a large theater this becomes even more obvious.
For this film, most of the Falls Free Press reporters got together for a movie night, viewing the film on a large high-pixel television with an excellent sound system. Occasionally in the past I have watched movies on similar sets when I have stayed at hotels, and it always seemed like something was wrong with the screen. I would usually pass it off as just being an older movie on a better screen, and that maybe Casper the friendly ghost had really just died of jaundice and they failed to mention it. For a new movie such as this however, there is no accounting for outdated computer animation. Nothing outside the human actors in the film looked real, especially Agent Garcia, the anthropomorphic polar bear, who looked imaginary whenever he touched a human. Compared to another talking polar bear, Iorek Byrnison in HBO’s series His Dark Materials, Iorek’s presentation far surpasses anything in this movie.
Looking at the reviews of Red One, it reminds me of what many had to say about Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in 1999. One such reviewer from Variety noted:
“Except for the desert scenes and a few other landscapes, the world of the movie is virtually entirely artificial, and some of the more obviously fake backdrops remind one that this is just a computer-generated version of the sort of ambiance habitually created some 50 to 60 years ago by most Hollywood pictures.”
At the time this computer-generated animation was meant to be the best way to produce worlds like George Lucas wanted to see in Star Wars, but audiences wanted to see a world they were more familiar with that didn’t look like it had been pulled from a completed coloring book. This is my consensus on Red One. The most honest parts of the entire movie involve Santa, Callum, Jack or his son. While giant ice creatures attacking these characters are great images, such should not be relied on throughout the entire film.
Overall, if you’re interested in a fun story of action and magic toys, and don’t mind the overdone computer animation, Red One is a fun afternoon holiday romp. If you prefer something more down to Earth however, I recommend checking out tomorrow’s film.
Red One is available to stream on Amazon Prime.
