Red One (2024)

Red One opens with a premise so perfectly engineered for a modern blockbuster that you can almost hear the studio pitch meeting: what if we made a Christmas action movie with The Rock, Captain America, and Santa Claus? The 2024 film, directed by Jake Kasdan, takes that elevator pitch and runs with it for two full hours, delivering exactly the movie you'd expect and almost nothing you wouldn't.

The Red One Christmas Movie Plot

The setup is simple. J.K. Simmons plays Santa Claus as a jacked, tattooed father figure who runs the North Pole like a Fortune 500 company. When Santa is kidnapped just days before Christmas, Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), the North Pole's head of security, is forced to recruit Jack O'Malley (Chris Evans), a wise-cracking bounty hunter on the naughty list, to track him down.

What follows is a globe-trotting buddy-cop adventure that borrows liberally from the Marvel playbook. There are CGI set pieces, quippy dialogue, a villain reveal that aims for emotional depth, and enough green screen to wallpaper a small country. Lucy Liu shows up as a mythological figure with her own agenda, adding a welcome edge to the proceedings.

The film wants desperately to launch a franchise. You can feel it in every world-building detail, from the tech-enhanced sleigh to the militarized elf operations center.

Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans as Christmas Action Heroes

Johnson and Evans have genuine chemistry together, which is the single biggest thing keeping Red One afloat. Evans, freed from his Captain America earnestness, plays O'Malley as a scruffy charmer who doesn't believe in Christmas magic until the plot requires him to. He's clearly having fun, and it shows.

Johnson does what Johnson always does: he's likeable, physically imposing, and completely incapable of disappearing into a role. Callum Drift is just Dwayne Johnson wearing a tactical Christmas sweater. That's fine for this kind of movie, but don't expect a performance that lingers.

The real scene-stealer is J.K. Simmons as Santa. There's something genuinely entertaining about watching the man who terrorized jazz students in Whiplash play a 6-foot-1 Santa who bench-presses in his workshop. Simmons commits fully to the role and brings a warmth that the rest of the film often lacks.

Does Red One Actually Feel Like Christmas?

Here's the thing. Red One uses Christmas as its setting and premise, but it doesn't really feel like a Christmas movie in the way that Home Alone or Elf does. Those films capture something specific about the season. Red One captures something specific about action movies that happen to feature snow.

The North Pole sequences are visually impressive but sterile. Everything looks like it was designed by a theme park architect rather than grown from any genuine holiday warmth. The elves are more like S.H.I.E.L.D. agents with pointy ears than anything from Christmas folklore.

When the film does lean into Christmas sentiment, particularly in the final act, it feels earned mostly by Simmons' performance rather than by anything the script has built. There's a scene where Santa explains why he keeps doing this job, year after year, that almost reaches something real before the film cuts away to another action sequence.

Where Red One Lands

Red One reportedly cost around $250 million to make, which is a staggering amount of money for a Christmas movie. For context, Elf cost $33 million. The budget shows on screen in the quality of the visual effects and the scale of the action, but money can't buy the thing that separates good Christmas movies from forgettable ones: a genuine emotional core.

The film is perfectly watchable. Kids will enjoy the action sequences. Adults will enjoy Johnson and Evans bouncing off each other. Nobody will be bored. But when you try to remember specific scenes a week later, you'll find they've blurred together into a general impression of explosions and tinsel.

Jake Kasdan, who directed both Jumanji sequels with Johnson, knows how to keep a big-budget production moving. The pacing rarely drags. But the script, by Chris Morgan of Fast and Furious fame, treats Christmas mythology the same way those films treat physics: as a set of rules that exist only to be spectacularly broken.

Red One is the first Christmas blockbuster that feels like it was reverse-engineered from a merchandise line. That's not entirely a criticism. Sometimes you want a candy cane, not a five-course meal. Just don't expect to still taste it by Boxing Day.