“Red One” is a holiday fantasy built on the retribution, punishment and crushed hopes we deserve right now. It imagines a nightmarish mass-incarceration scenario put in motion by a Christmas witch seeking revenge on billions worldwide who’ve landed on Santa’s previously unenforced “naughty list.” Job one: abduct St. Nick, code name Red One (J.K. Simmons), suck the goodness out of him with expensive and mediocre digital effects, and leave him a lifeless shell of his former magical self.
Some films go wrong in postproduction. Some films go wrong in production. Some films go wrong before production, at various points where the script could’ve been saved. And some films, like “Red One,” start from a premise (producer Hiram Garcia gets a story credit here) that wasn’t right from the beginning.
Two worlds share the screen in “Red One,” one a realm of mythological legends, the other focused on selfish, thoughtless human beings in everyday life.
The well-known naughty list is up 22% from last year; people of all ages have lost touch with decency, kindness and basic humanity, enough so that Santa’s paramilitary security officer Callum Drift, played by Dwayne Johnson, has sunk into a funk that only retirement, he thinks, can solve. “There’s so much bad behavior out there, everywhere you look,” he says, flatly, to the glaringly buff Father Christmas played by Simmons. It’s as if Callum had spent every night of his life watching “Jingle All the Way,” which “Red One” manages to one-up in the depressing-mayhem department.
