Film Review: Red One

“After Santa Claus (code name: Red One) is kidnapped, the North Pole’s Head of Security (Dwayne Johnson) must team up with the world’s most infamous bounty hunter (Chris Evans) in a globe-trotting, action-packed mission to save Christmas.”- Warner Bros

Snapshot Review: Directed by Jake Kasdan, his previous experience directing the “Jumanji” movies is evident in “Red One”. It’s a fairly formulaic bug-budget, special-effects-with-monsters-film. Though it has a few funny moments, it isn’t funny enough to be called a comedy and with a 12A rating, it struggles to straddle the line between attracting a young audience (no f-words, sex, or gore), while also entertaining an adult audience. While that might work with Jumanji films, it didn’t work that well for me given the Christmas-themed storyline. It’s very modern interpretation of Santa Claus as being physically fit and living in a high-tech mega city (think Asgard in the North Pole) was a big miss. Everyone knows that Santa is a fat, jolly man with a bushy white beard.  JK Simmons completely fails to capture any nostalgic memories or feelings of my vision of Santa and though, silly as it sounds, it was just too far off for me. One thing that did work well was Kristofer Hivju (as Krampus) who stole the picture.

Acting performances were fine all around, with the exception of Lucy Liu who was unexpectedly awful, and special effects were good. I especially liked the sequence with the ‘snow men’ and the last 5 or so minutes of the film (I won’t spoil it for you). Red One is what it is, a mass-market big-budget special effects film that tries to carve out a small niche with a silly Christmas storyline. Is it entertaining? Yes. Is it sometimes dumb and cheesy? Yes. Should you care? Probably not.

Release Date: 06/11/2024
Rating: 12A
Genre: Action – Adventure – Comedy
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu

Robert Lee

::: Renowned For Sound Technical Director and Film Reviewer ::: Robert is an IT geek, movie fan and part-time movie reviewer/editor. Robert also looks after the ‘behind the scenes’ technical elements of Renowned For Sound.