Review: Red One Wasn’t Terrible but Wasn’t Great (Spoilers)

I know. Christmas is over. The New Year starts on Wednesday. Why am I reviewing a Christmas movie now?

Answer: Because I just saw it and as far as I’m concerned, the Christmas season lasts until January 1.

I first heard about Red One from a bunch of YouTube notifications from the channel Disparu talking about how the critics hated it. However, if you look at Rotten Tomatoes, the audience score shows that most people really liked it. So, what’s the controversy? Was it really as bad as the critics say it is? Was it a gem? In my opinion, it was meh; not amazing, but not terrible, either.

#1: CGI

This is my main problem with the movie. The CGI looks like the CGI they used in the 2011 adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters. That is to say, it wasn’t very good. It looked cheap, like the VFX houses in charge of making it were hanging on by their last nerve before Christmas break. The only CGI that I thought looked good were the reindeer, and that was it.

#2: Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans

Some people might not like me for saying this, but with how many movies that Rock has appeared in recently, he’s becoming a bit overused. That’s not to say that he’s terrible in this movie – he did a good job for the role he played and fit right in given that this is an action movie directed by the same guy who directed Jumanji – but I feel like he’s the same person in almost every movie he’s in. He almost never changes, and this movie isn’t much different.

Chris Evans, on the other hand, was better because he seems to have more acting range. Maybe it’s because I’ve only seen him in the Avengers movies where he plays Captain America, but it surprised me a bit to see him playing a scummy person and totally selling it (though maybe that’s because Evans is a crappy person in real life). His character also had a character arc where he changes for the better, while the Rock just stays the Rock.

#3: Originality

Red One, even with its crappy CGI, is an interesting take on a Christmas film. While, yes, the plot does work on the same premise of many other Christmas movies of “We need to save Christmas because of X, Y, Z,” it’s different in that it’s an action movie. Pretty much every character in this movie is meant to appeal to the male audience. It’s full of fight scenes and action sequences, which isn’t something I’ve seen with most other Christmas movies, which are usually comedies or more lighthearted, making this movie not feel like a generic Christmas film.

#4: PG-13

One thing that I didn’t like about this movie was that they went totally PG-13 with it. There was a ton of swearing in it and several scenes that included scantily clad women, which was quite incongruous with the more childish aspects of the movie, such as the giant polar bear or Santa and his elves. This movie, though it had an original spin on most of the Christmas movies we have, seemed to have a hard time realizing that if you put a giant polar bear and Santa in a movie, kids are going to want to watch it, so maybe make it less PG-13 and more PG.

#5: The Morals

The thing that saves this movie from being a total dumpster fire is the moral at the end. The thing that’s constantly said in this movie that we no longer hear a lot of in the media is that your actions are a choice. It’s one of the first things said by Santa and it’s a running theme throughout the film. An example of this is when Chris Evans’s character steals a coin from Krampus’s statue, he tries to blame it on the fact that he owes a lot of money to some people, but the Rock calls him out on it because there’s still other ways to make that money that don’t involve stealing. This sense of morality is what drives every character to one extent or the other, including the villain, Gryla. She sees that everyone has chosen to do something bad at some point and wishes to punish all of them for all of it. However, when she traps Evans’s character, what saves him isn’t brute strength, but apologizing for his failures and asking for forgiveness from his son, who he’s wronged.

I was honestly surprised to see this morality shine through a movie on Amazon as it’s fairly Christian or at the very least, common sense. Though I’m definitely not saying that this movie is a Christian movie (it’s still a very secular movie as we’ve seen earlier, with aspects of it being drawn from other religions) most movies would be condoning people’s evil actions because they’re actually misunderstood or were bullied at some point, but this one doesn’t and calls it out for what it is. Even if you were wronged, what you do is your choice and you are responsible for what happens, not the other person or society and it takes sincere repentance in order to start the journey of making it right. It’s this morality that is why I think that so many people in the audience really enjoyed this film because it’s a call back to a sane society.

Until next time,

M.J.