Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans' (and Lucy Liu, and J.K. Simmons') cinematic Christmas is not your usual Christmas. Red One, directed by Jake Kasdan, is an action comedy in theaters from November 7, 2024.
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| Image Credit: Amazon MGM Studios |
A few weeks ahead of schedule, Red One arrives in Italian theaters on November 7, 2024, for Warner Bros. Entertainment Italia with the clear intent of resuscitating, using some appropriate deviations from the model, the magical spirit of Christmas. Directed by Jake Kasdan, who was already behind the camera in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019), with a screenplay by Chris Morgan from a story by Hiram Garcia. The cast is remarkable and that is not an exaggeration: Chris Evans, Dwayne Johnson, Lucy Liu, Kiernan Shipka, Bonnie Hunt, and J.K. Simmons.
The idea is to pay homage to Christmas mythology and sentiment by updating them, surrounding them with unedited imagery – for the type of film, because the story is actually very, very aware of its debts of inspiration – and moving away from tradition as much as possible and then turning and, it would not even be necessary to specify, returning to the base. The ending is pure Christmas spirit, what happens before not really. On the crest of this contradiction, deliberate, and lucidly constructed, the film plays its game and tries to win the heart of the viewer.
Red One: hanno kidnapped Babbo Natale
Maybe Christmas is not the typical intellectual property that majors and platforms usually use to build derivative and very unoriginal contemporary cinema, but it is certainly a good starting point for a commercial storytelling that does not want to take too many risks, and, why not? build yet another franchise. The game of Red One, as already said, consists of juxtaposing two opposing and specular visions - the most classic Christmas feeling vs. an unconventional narration - to find out what happens next.
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| Image Credit: Amazon MGM Studios |
Jake Kasdan tries to tackle the Christmas mythology head-on by simply reinventing it, but perhaps that is not the right term. It is better not to talk about reinvention because in that case, it would be a matter of intervening in a pre-existing imaginary by altering it, defining new rules, establishing other scenarios, and rewriting its conventions. This is not the case. There has never been too much Christmas mythology, at least in the movies, apart from the essentials – the suit, the sleigh, the reindeer, the snow, in short, the ABC – and this void to fill offers the film an interesting starting point.
Red One builds a world from scratch or almost, a universe of references and a Christmas atmosphere much more muscular and adrenaline-filled than how we are used to thinking of them. Santa Claus is a tough guy. His name is Nick (J.K. Simmons), and he does a lot of exercise to keep fit for the evening of the 24th, in his free time he welcomes children in shopping malls in complete anonymity – a bit like Chaplin when he entered a Charlot lookalike contest and came in third because no one recognized him – he has a bodyguard in an existential crisis who can no longer believe in the spirit of Christmas, Cal (Dwayne Johnson), and a devoted wife (Bonnie Hunt). Nick runs Operation Christmas from the headquarters at the North Pole, which is as big as a metropolis, assisted by an army of collaborators.
Army is the right word; Red One imagines a Christmas halfway between Operation Desert Storm – Red One is the code name for Santa Claus – and a decidedly more colorful and saccharine version of a James Bond film. What happens is that on the evening of December 23, everything goes wrong. The witch Grýla (Kiernan Shipka), animated by nefarious intentions, kidnaps Nick and puts him out of action. Not even the head of the secret services of the mythological world, Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu), has the faintest idea of how to foil the plot, return Nick to his family, and, above all, save Christmas. The most unusual of couples take care of it: Cal and Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), a brilliant hacker, unhappy and alcoholic, a less than exemplary father, and, in a word, the character furthest from the spirit of Christmas that one could imagine. The film’s humor, action, and emotion are based on the juxtaposition of the opposite personalities of the odd couple Chris Evans & Dwayne Johnson. A buddy movie with a Christmas theme, no more, no less. In reality, there’s more.
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| Image Credit: Amazon MGM Studios |
A typical and, at the same time, not-so-typical Christmas movie
To sum up: buddy movie, action, thriller pulses, a couple of horror suggestions, incorrect comedy even if it could be more daring, Christmas spirit, and reflection on goodness, warmth, and family. Red One is not the classic Christmas movie and makes no secret of its desire to be something other than what one expects. It openly plays at desecrating the model by enriching it with new thrusts, perspectives, and angles, while trying, at the same time, to keep the emotional undertone intact: of the holiday and of the cinema that tells it. Jake Kasdan designs a technically impeccable action movie because there is not a moment of respite and the plot does not impose its ups and downs in a forced and cumbersome way.
Much of the story's charm is supported and fueled by the charisma and happy intertwining of the prestigious protagonists - a remarkable cast - starting with the duo Evans and Johnson (the first foul-mouthed and crumpled, the second granite and sensitive, they work) to continue with the always spot on J.K Simmons, the return of the never forgotten Lucy Liu and one of the first real roles that count in cinema for Kiernan Shipka, Sally Draper of Mad Men (a role for which she will be remembered, like it or not, until the end of time). The emotion is pure Christmas standard; the call to the inner child, the exhortation to never stop wondering, the invitation to work hard to try to be the best version of yourself.
Red One is an action comedy that enjoys hiding its sentimental heart; tries to be so many stories, so many genres and so many atmospheres to the point, it is inevitable, of stealing a lot from everyone but never enough from each, ending up offering the viewer an imprecise and contradictory vision. The film is, at the same time, the iconoclastic attack on Christmas cinema and a mix of ideas and inspirations rather derivative in the search for narrative structures and suggestions that are all too consolidated. Now we have a mythology tailored for Christmas too; it is not clear whether it was needed or not, but we have it. Red One tries to do something different, without seriously innovating. Its game is an interesting contradiction, which does not entirely pay off.
Red One: evaluation and conclusion
Jake Kasdan knows how to build a tense and vibrant action without missing a beat. He knows how to combine melancholy and humor, and he knows how to manage the personalities, quirks, and idiosyncrasies of his remarkable cast. But Red One cannot be defined, on any level, as a 100% successful film, because the contradictory game it chooses to play – being at the same time the Christmas film par excellence and the least Christmassy one possible – does not resolve, as it should, in an honorable draw that enhances the best of both worlds, that is, the iconoclastic approach and the call to a certain type of warmth and feeling. The film ends up being, with its reference to so much contemporary commercial cinema, more repetitive than necessary. The mythology introduced for the occasion works especially with Kiernan Shipka's Grýla, a character from Icelandic folklore, but beyond the idea of transforming Christmas into a very calibrated military-espionage-humorous operation, Red One fails to fully cultivate its imagery.
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