ZERO STARS/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, J.K. Simmons
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by Jake Kasdan
by Walter Chaw I’ve been waiting decades for a spiritual successor to Jingle All the Way, that repugnant ode to materialism gussied up in Yuletide cheer like a corpulent whore from a Victorian stroke-book. Remember that moment in The Rundown where Arnold Schwarzenegger makes a brief cameo to “hand off” his action-king crown to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? Turns out it was a monkey’s paw predicting the foolhardiness of them pursuing cush gigs in comic-book franchises and immortality in beloved perennial family holiday classics. How many fingers do monkeys have, anyway? Jake Kasdan’s Red One casts The Rock as humourless man of action Callum Drift. Not humourless like fellow professional wrestler Dave Bautista’s brilliant turn as neurodivergent Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy, humourless like a guy doing a tough-guy bit… and also a dull-guy bit, and, uh, dense, you know–disillusioned, too, because grown-ups don’t love Christmas anymore. Callum, you see, is head bodyguard to Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) and the leader of ELF, which stands for I don’t fucking know, go watch it yourself. Elite L-something and Fortification or someshit; honestly, we’re both diminished just acknowledging it. Wait, “Enforcement, Logistics, and Fortification.” Fuck. This is humiliating.
There’s a sequence in this film that’s five minutes of driving and talking where Callum recites most of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” as exposition. “He has a list of everyone! He checks it twice! He knows who’s naughty and nice!” Do you ever have that thing where you can feel yourself aging? Just the wheel of time wearing you down to greasy soot and wet ash? Callum is retiring after One Last Christmas, meaning that shenanigans are on tap, at the end of which Callum will decide to stay on for a few more cycles. Maybe he’ll play the Tooth Fairy again. The Rock, I mean. One shenanigan is Gryla (Kiernan Shipka, naughty), a witch like the White Witch from Narnia who wants to steal Santa’s Christmas power to create a bunch of magic snowglobes and take over the world. I should mention that Callum has a shrink-ray with which he can miniaturize a snowmobile–which is less useful than a helicopter or a jet, but, look, if I really knew better I’d be writing quarter-of-a-billion-dollar boondoggles that are instant shorthands for bad ideas excreted by committee for the pleasure of cotton-headed ninny-muggins instead of generally failing to pay my mortgage. This magic shrink-ray can even conjure a chicken and, I don’t know, whatever you need when you need it most. It’s like a credit card for deus ex machinae. The interest rate? Surprisingly low. I swear to God this movie feels longer than Don McLean’s “American Pie.”
Where were we? Did I mention how the North Pole is this heavily fortified/industrialized manufacturing plant–the perfect manifestation of what the military-industrial complex would look like in practice? This ugly blight of exploited workers, a violent and overfunded police force, and a ruling class operating in leisure? Gone are the archetypal cozy cottage and simple magic of belief, replaced by a long, pornographic tracking-shot appreciation of Clydesdale-sized magic reindeer with luminescent antlers, glowing eyes, and bad attitudes. You know that hour Robert Wise spent pleasuring himself to the docked Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture? That but with reindeer, because when you’re doing a militaristic Christmas agitprop piece for the stupidest and most bellicose country in the world, you make the reindeer enormous, armoured, fire-breathing dealers of death. It’s what pods crave. There’s an additional plot–not a subplot, but like a whole second movie happening at the same time–involving bounty hunter/hacker/refugee from the Hudson Hawk school of elaborate capers Jack (Chris Pratt…no, Ryan Reynolds–no, wait, Chris Evans), a bad dad to a hateful kid (Wesley Kimmel) with whom he’ll have a poignant reunion once he proves that all his crime-ing has made him uniquely suited to save Christmas. Jack is enlisted to help Callum find Santa, as, despite the sorcery and supernatural technology of white Wakanda, it’s Jack who’s the key to showing Callum that although the great majority of adults are venal, self-interested twats, not all of them are. Well, at least not all the time, what do you want from me?
There’s also a shadow agency called M.O.R.A. (Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority) that resembles a tired gloss on Hellboy‘s Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, because there needs to be a bureaucratic heavy (Lucy Liu, in this case) Callum can rebel against righteously. This is awfully rich, given that Callum is such a company man he’s carefully typed out a letter of resignation, but dwell too much on why that detail is honoured while entire logical threads are abandoned and, well, look: nothing good can possibly come of it. There is a scene ripped from the 1980 Flash Gordon where a bunch of ruffians Pleasure Island the shit out of each other while engaging in a tribute to Dana White’s televised sideshow “Power Slap”. I do wonder at the wisdom of including hilarious brain damage in a children’s entertainment. Wait, is Red One for children? Who wanted this? It’s not that I care about your kids, it’s that I care that they can buy guns and vote eventually. There’s more plot, but I’m tired. The CGI is at once hideous and unimaginative–the Cybertruck version of fantasy/futurism–and the world-building is like cotton candy, all volume and no substance. Have I talked about the parkour? Isn’t it enough to say there is some? What would be enough? For real, what would be enough?
