I walked into "Red One" armed with precisely nothing but a minor hunch and perhaps a little hardened prejudice against movies that wear jingling bells on their sleeves. Christmas films—those syrupy retail rituals—usually march in like a mall Santa two cups deep, so forgive me for expecting a rerun of reindeer games. But director Jake Kasdan, of all people, produces something so deliciously unexpected, so giddy in its mash-up of action spectacle and Yuletide lunacy, that half an hour in I found myself grinning in the dark, my inner cynic in full retreat.
Let’s get the card on the table: Dwayne Johnson, as Callum Drift, is exactly the Rock you hope for—bone-crunching intensity papered with that bemused teddy-bear self-awareness that turns even the corniest dialogue into something you’re embarrassed to enjoy. Chris Evans, as Jack O’Malley, plays a hacker with the sort of cocky, exasperated flair that, next to The Rock, might usually disappear into the woodwork—but here, miraculously, he thrives. And then there’s the true surprise package under the cinematic tree: J.K. Simmons shredding any notions you had of Santa Claus with muscles to make Schwarzenegger reach for another eggnog. Yes, we’ve seen Santa reimagined more times than "A Christmas Carol" gets revived in dinner theaters, but Simmons delivers a Santa as if he’d bench-pressed your childhood and then charmed your mother for dessert. The result is a rampaging, nimble, utterly authentic Claus—none of that anesthetized ho-ho-ho business; this Saint Nick could deadlift a sleigh and still beat you at poker.
It’s rare for a holiday film to show its mythos at the level of mechanical detail—the gravitational economics of Santa’s carb binge finally make sense (of course the man needs cookies, he’s burning 430 million of them in one night!), and suddenly every gingerbread left on the plate seems like part of a sacred metabolic transaction. The script, by Chris Morgan, knows when to punch up the ridiculous and when to lean in with an emotional jab. If the dialogue wobbles on occasion—winking at its own Christmas-movie cheese—it’s only the price of admission for a holiday film that’s just as eager to mock nostalgia as to serve it up with a marzipan smile.
But what thrills me is Kasdan’s willingness to let the camera barrel headlong through candy-cane logic with the glee of a child let loose in a pop-up toy store. Santa’s sleigh as an F-35 variant might sound like a joke in a mid-budget sketch show, but on screen it’s a perfectly logical extension of Christmas magic: fast, noisy, gloriously improbable. If you’re the sort who wants your holiday myth pure and unsullied—if you can’t endure a little action-hero swagger with your winter cheer—well, there’s always Turner Classic Movies.
Action set pieces at the North Pole, a warehouse siege that plays like "Die Hard" on fruitcake, and a villain, Grýla, whose name sounds like a dyspeptic Icelandic pastry chef but whose menace is no joke—it’s all outrageous and somehow it works. The film juggles tone like a veteran gift-wrapper with only five seconds before opening time, but never drops the box.
Is it a bulletproof script? Of course not. It teeters on the edge of predictability and sometimes falls face-first into a vat of sugar-glazed cliché, but it does so with eyes wide open, winking at you from beneath the pine needles. When Evans’ Jack O’Malley learns to believe again, it’s not the canned sentiment of so many Hallmark hours—it’s the emotional mid-air somersault the genre so rarely lands on its feet.
What makes "Red One" stand out, though, is that while it bathes in action, it never loses sight of Christmas’s enduring argument: that the real magic is believing in—and connecting with—each other, not just reliving the faded warmth of holidays past. Kasdan keeps the sentiment on a simmer, letting humor and kinetic spectacle carry us through any soft patches.
All told, "Red One" is a cracked geode gleaming in the ruins of Christmas-movie sameness—a wild, inventive, happy-to-be-here blast of tinsel-flecked originality. It’s not just another heartwarming tale dolled up in red velvet; it’s a reminder that sometimes what you want in your stocking is a little anarchy, a protein shake, and a Santa who could snap a candy cane with his biceps. Bring it into your holiday rotation, and leave it a cookie with extra carbs. This one’s earned it.
