Knock on Wood

I actually have a lot of respect for the craftsmanship of this movie for one specific reason: it has perfected the art of being a braindead studio cash grab.

All I could think while watching Red One was how this was written by someone who understands exactly how to write a script that a studio will buy. It has a snappy opening that hammers home exactly one (1) character trait of the protagonist, characters that sound interesting if you sum them up in one sentence (but don’t have any actual depth), and a simple and easily digestible message that’s broad enough that no one will dislike it (but also doesn’t really say anything). The jokes are written just clearly enough to be recognizable as jokes, but none of them are written well enough to make you laugh. There’s some action with cool gimmicks that probably read as dynamic on the page, but in execution is just not interesting enough to justify their length. All the action and the comedy seems to be in the script for no purpose other than to pass the threshold required for an action comedy in the eyes of an exec who doesn’t care (the threshold being that it has action and comedy). I spent the whole time in awe of the screenwriter’s ability to write a script that’s perfect to sell to someone who wants to make money.

The casting is an overall mess, most glaringly concerning Chris Evans and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. Maybe the fact that Red One was shot two years ago, before Ghosted and Black Adam had been released, explains this, but casting the two main characters of your action comedy blockbuster with two actors who have lost all their star credibility does not make for a good start.

Sure, during the Avengers era, seeing Chris Evans’ name on a poster might have made me consider seeing a movie, but Evans hasn’t given a performance that I’ve cared about, especially not in a studio blockbuster, since 2019. Chris Evans probably only took this role because they’d pay him a gajillion dollars and he wouldn’t even have to memorize any lines, because all he does is repeat other people’s lines back to them. In fact, almost everything he says is either the last word of whatever he just heard, or a line so transparently stupid that it clearly only exists to be used in the trailer.

The Rock is laughably bad. I liked him in Moana, and since then I have only had negative feelings towards every performance of his that I’ve seen (I know Rowan really likes Jungle Cruise, so maybe that’s an exception, but I haven’t seen it, so it doesn’t count). I would even go so far as to call the Rock the opposite of a movie star at this point in time; if he’s the leading man in a film, I am actively less interested in seeing it.

Red One’s biggest whiff isn’t the casting or the dialogue…it’s the fact that it’s rated PG-13. Why the hell wasn’t this a PG movie? It should have been a fun family movie marketed hard on social media for 8-12 year olds. It should have been advertised on Disney XD (does that still exist?), or with a Roblox collaboration, or through brand deals in the middle of Mr. Beast videos. It basically is a kids movie when you look at the plot and the dialogue, aside from Chris Evans occasionally saying “shit” and action that’s slightly too violent, but nowhere near violent nor interesting enough to set it apart. I hate that I think there’s the makings of a fun Christmas action comedy for children in here, but no one seemed to care enough to make that movie.

So much of this movie feels like the product of studio executives seeing ideas and saying “that’s good enough for me!” For example, the villain’s big scheme is to capture all the naughty listers in their own magic snow globe by gifting every bad person a snow globe for Christmas, and that’s enough for a dumbass looking to make money to go “Oh, cute, it’s on-theme and evil without being too dark” but then when it’s on-screen, it couldn’t be dumber. It’s like the creative team decided to not cut a single thing. You’ve probably heard of “show don’t tell,” but then there’s also the lesser known and far inferior method that this movie chooses to employ, called “tell and then show and then tell a lot more just in case.” And I actually like a lot of the ideas in this! But that’s all they really are – ideas.

Despite all the things I’ve just said, I don’t think Red One is as bad as people online want you to believe. In fact, I think if you put Ryan Gosling in the Chris Evans role, replace the Rock with someone who isn’t completely dogshit at acting, and recast pretty much everyone else except for J. K. Simmons, Nick Kroll, and Krampus, this could be a charming movie. Maybe hire a new editor too, while we’re at it.

There actually are things that stand out as solidly good. Everything about Krampus was awesome. He’s the most interesting character by far, his scenes are very fun, the performance from Kristofer Hivju is on point, and he looks amazing. In fact, all the practical makeup and effects look great. I like all of the digital characters (especially the polar bear), even if the CGI backgrounds and action sequences did not look nearly as good (some, me included, might even go so far as to say they looked really bad).

Nick Kroll’s performance is hilarious for the five minutes he’s on screen. It felt like he was giving a performance so earnest that it almost mocked the movie it was in. There were moments where he’s supposed to be conveying fear, and instead of doing a cartoony approximation of being afraid, he goes all in on conveying genuine terror. When the Rock and Chris Evans are standing right there doing nothing in comparison, it ends up being really funny.

When people keep talking about how the movie is unwatchably bad, I think they’re mistaken. It’s unwatchably mid. It does just enough to be a real movie, the type you can categorize and merchandise and recommend via algorithms. It gets the job done. It clears every bar it needs to. But it’s not good. It’s every movie you’ve ever seen randomly when the extended family is in town and you want to go to a movie together, but nothing big is playing. It’s a movie designed to live as a Blu-ray in front of the checkout aisle at Target with a 30% off sticker slapped on the case. It’s the product of executives deciding to spend $250 million on something so aggressively whatever instead of greenlighting 20 mid-budget dramas or comedies featuring new and exciting voices. Maybe that’s why people hate it so much.

For lack of a better conclusion, I will admit that this review has been constructed almost exclusively out of stuff I wrote down in my notes app while I was watching the movie (Rowan and I sat in the very back of the theater on the side so I didn’t disturb anyone – don’t worry), so I’m going to end with some of the other nonsense I wrote that I couldn’t fit anywhere else but still wanted to include:

• If I was adopted into a family with a son named Nicholas and my name was Krampus and everyone just referred to me as “the brother” because Santa was my brother, I would probably become evil too.
• Something something, Christmas Avengers. Krampus smash, or whatever. I’ll write a better joke later.
• Chris Evans talks about his kid like a guy in a situationship talking to a girl that he doesn’t want to commit to. We’re supposed to feel really bad for the kid, but he just bitches the whole time, and his nostrils are never not flaring. 
• There are two, count em, two instances of “guy gets hit in the balls.”

Red One is playing in theaters now.

If you want to see a real Christmas film, check out Hot Frosty on Netflix.