Red One (2024)

Red One (2024)

6/10

Starring

Dwayne Johnson

Chris Evans

Lucy Liu

J. K. Simmons

 

Directed by Jake Kasdan

 

The movie has a lot of one-liners about how to be a better person, but not enough actual plot to make it a good movie worth recommending. Funny enough, even though many critics dislike it, I found it okay. It was not as bad as many say, and I did not feel like I had wasted my time seeing this movie.

The film does a decent job of creating an action-packed world where Santa is guarded by a top-tier secret service of mythical creatures, which are a step above the gadget filled world of James Bond.

I can tell that the macho madness the movie portrays can be annoying. There are so many muscle flexing scenes that are completely irrelevant to the plot. If you pay attention to the CGI and the A-list actors involved, it's easy to see why many believe Amazon spent too much money on this.

The plot revolves around a world where Santa is real, delivering gifts on Christmas Day. It turns out there’s an agency called MORA, led by Zoe (Lucy Liu), that deals with mythical creatures and ensures peace between humans and these creatures.

Santa’s secret service, ELF (Enforcement, Logistics, and Fortification), headed by Cal (The Rock), runs Santa’s operations and protects him. As expected, Santa has enemies, and one of them hires Jack (Chris Evans), the world’s top tracker, to locate him. Jack doesn’t know that the people who hired him want to track Santa.

Santa gets kidnapped, and MORA traces the trail back to Jack. He teams up with Cal to rescue Santa and save Christmas.

The Jack character is a weird development, someone this good in computers and tracking made himself so easy to track. You would expect he would know best how to make sure he is not traced back to the causes of the things he has caused. But the movie does not think this is important.

For a film with a budget of $250 million, the plot isn't even close to being box office breaking. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has never been the reason I’d rush to the theater, and clearly, many production companies think otherwise. Plus, many of his lady fans, but even them are not enough to take this movie from being a box office dud to a box office hit.

Though the plot is a familiar one in Christmas movies, it is fun to watch Jack, the unbeliever, realize that his actions have consequences. It’s an okay movie, but it’s hard to say it’s worth going out of your way to see.