If I were to rate the bloated and cynical yet also teeth-rattlingly saccharine Christmas action comedy “Red One” purely by what transpires onscreen, I probably would have given one and a half stars, two at the most. It’s awful, but disposable and easily forgotten.
Here’s the thing though. I didn’t see “Red One” in standard-issue viewing environs; I was shown the film in a 4DX auditorium, which made for a memorably bad experience. My seat shook and rolled and pitched and heaved to reflect the action onscreen, mist drifted into the theater, the occasional light spray of water would hit me in the face, and there were simulations of snow falling and wind whipping. The net effect was akin to white-knuckling it through a two-hour flight roiled by rough turbulence, where fellow passengers would occasionally kick the back of your seat or spill a bit of their drink into your face, while mini-gusts of chilly wind would zip past your ears.
Add J.K. Simmons to the list of well-known actors who have played unconventional versions of Santas in recent times, joining the likes of David Harbour in “Violent Night,” Mel Gibson in “Fat Man” and Kurt Russell in “The Christmas Chronicles.” Simmons’ Santa Claus (code named “Red One” by his security detail) is a centuries-old and quite buff Claus who presides over a magical North Pole operation that includes gigantic (and terribly rendered) CGI reindeer and various anthropomorphic entities.
When Santa is kidnapped, his longtime head of security, Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), must deliver the bad news to Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu), the head of security for MORA., which stands for Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority, and we’re told they’re in charge of overseeing the longstanding and top-secret treaty between mythological beings (turns out the Headless Horseman is real) and regular ol’ humans.
Chris Evans, gliding through an unchallenging and poorly written role, plays one Jack O’Malley, who is one of the world’s best computer hackers (he’s somewhere between white hat and black hat) and is also a degenerate gambler and absentee father who works hard to avoid spending any quality time with his son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel). Turns out Jack unknowingly provided Santa’s kidnappers with the necessary intel to snatch Red One, and now Jack is forced to team up with Callum for a clichéd buddy movie where the humorless Callum and the selfish Jack must put aside their differences and save Christmas and all that.
Like Ant-Man in a “Transformers” movie, Callum can shrink himself, and he can turn Hot Wheels (product placement alert!) into life-sized cars. A miscast Kiernan Shipka plays an ancient witch named Gryla who has kidnapped Santa Claus for Thanos-like reasons, and though Gryla is a shape-shifting monster who supposedly strikes fear into the hearts of all, most of the time she’s about as terrifying as a petulant influencer on Tik Tok complaining that her favorite brand of lip gloss is going off the market.
Despite the best efforts of that top-name cast, “Red One” looks astonishingly murky and crummy for a film with a reported budget of $250 million. Whether the locales are a generic American city or Aruba or Bavaria or the North Pole, everything looks computerized, digitized and sanitized.
The 4DX viewing experience has been around for some 15 years, and various immersive, multi-sensory enhancements date back decades earlier, e.g., the 3D movies of the 1920s, the “Emergo” techno-gimmickry in William Castle’s 1958 “The House on Haunted Hill,” the Smell-O-Vision experiment in the 1960 film “Scent of Mystery,” the use of Sensurround in 1970s films such as “Earthquake” and “Rollercoaster.” At best, these innovations are novelties; at worst, they’re silly and irritating distractions. For “Red One,” the armrests had a button with “Water On” and “Water Off” options, so you could at least decline the option of getting spritzed in the face. Too bad they didn’t also include a “Make It All Stop” button.