The Red One was a mediocre movie at best which ended up wasting 2 hours and 3 minutes of my time.
The Red One is a Christmas themed action movie starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, J. K. Simmons, Lucy Liu, and Kiernan Shipka as the lead actors. It was directed by Jake Kasdan, who also directed Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and written by Hiram Garcia, who also wrote Jumanji: The Next Level. The movie had a budget of 250 million dollars USD.
The main plot of the movie is that Santa (J.K. Simmons) was kidnapped by Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), a winter witch, so that she can use his duplication powers to create thousands of glaskafigs, a magical snow globe which can imprison others. Gryla wants to use these snow globes to trap everyone who has ever been on the naughty list. So, the head of the North Pole’s security department, Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), and the world’s best tracker, Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), are tasked by Zoe (Lucy Liu) to find Santa.
The movie had an interesting premise with tracking down a kidnapped Santa, and the trailers were fun. But the trailers specifically showed pretty much all the best scenes in the movie, especially with the snowman battle on the beach, which, to me, was the best use of CGI in the entire movie.
The trailers also showed Garcia, a talking polar bear voiced by Reinaldo Faberlle, a lot which led myself and many others to believe that he would play a big role in the movie, but instead he got a total of three minutes of screen time. I found this extremely disappointing since I really liked the character based on the trailers and was excited to see more of him.
Another disappointing thing about the movie was the CGI. Some models looked really nice, like the snowmen, but most of them looked awkward. This wouldn’t be a huge problem if most of the mythical creatures weren’t CGI. The best of the mythical creatures were all the ones at Krampus’ party which I theorize were most likely prosthetics rather than CGI. However, I cannot find a source on whether this is true or not, so take it with a grain of salt.
The overall plot wasn’t executed well either. It was an interesting idea with a ton of potential, but the execution of it wasn’t the best. For being the world’s best tracker, Jack only tracks down one person in the entire movie: the man who paid Jack to, unknowingly, give him Santa’s coordinates via seismic activity. Most of the time Jack just follows Callum to different locations.
Another character that was somewhat prominent was Jack’s son, Dylan who is played by Wesley Kimmel. Dylan didn’t feel like a character, more like a tool for angst and to show Jack learned a lesson at the end of the movie. If he was removed from the movie, pretty much nothing would change.
Another thing that was a bit annoying was all the jump cuts in the action scenes. Jump cuts can make for fun and engaging action scenes, but overuse can make it boring or hard to watch. Jump cuts can also cause motion sickness in some people, which make the action scenes in Red One a hard watch for those people.
Overall, Red One isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen nor the worst movie I’ve seen recently, it’s just disappointing. It might be a good watch if you just want to turn your brain off for about 2 hours, but I overall don’t recommend watching Red One.
