3 min to read
Red One
How good is this new Christmas movie?
The Good: As for Christmas movies, this movie does a fantastic job at using the Santa/Christmas lore that is heard all across the world. This movie incorporates multiple mythological creatures that are told across Christmas tales across the world, and the way these creatures/characters are incorporated into the story was really well done. The film creates a world in which you could totally see all of these characters/creatures coexisting, and I haven’t seen many Christmas movies that were able to effectively use these Christmas characters/creatures like this movie does. The movie also had the most believable way of Santa delivering presents shown in a movie that I’ve ever seen. It’s unique, but it genuinely felt that they came up with a plausible way for Santa to deliver presents everywhere.
While the story does go all over the place in the middle of the movie, the opening scenes introducing you to Chris Evans’s character (Jack) was hilarious. This opening is one of the stand out scenes in the movie, and Chris Evans acting makes it all the better.
The Meh: Not only did the action fall a little flat, all of the action in the trailers is basically what there is in the movie, with only a bit extra. This was extremely disappointing, especially since the movie is supposed to be part/most action movie, so the fact that there wasn’t that much more action and none of it really stood out was a little disappointing and made what was shown a little underwhelming.
What also made the action/story feel a little more bland and disappointing is that the characters were not that interesting. Besides Jack (Chris Evans), every other character was extremely generic and had no personality, especially The Rock’s character. While the movie tried to make the Rock’s character interesting, all of its attempts were so cheesy it made my wife and I giggle at them.
The Bad: One of the things that made me a little hopeful for the movie was that it was a Christmas action movie. Most Christmas movies recently have really felt like they are mainly for kids, and having there be a more “mature” Christmas movie seemed quite interesting to me. What was extremely disappointing about the final result is that the movie doesn’t do great at being an action movie or a Christmas movie. There are some decent individual scenes for each type of movie, but as a whole it is just a mess.
Another aspect of the disappointing “mature” Christmas movie is that for this type of movie there was a significant amount of swearing in it. Despite wanting it to be more “mature,” I was also hoping this could be a decent enough new Christmas movie that more teenagers could get involved with, but there was so much swearing in there for a PG13 movie. That disappointed me.
In addition to the boring characters and the very average story, the pacing of the movie was all over the place. The beginning and the ending both had a great flow, but the middle of the movie was just a mess and made the movie feel very long. They wanted to introduce and explore a lot of fun ideas, but those ideas were not explored in an interesting way. The had plot lines that had no purpose, scenes that were way too long, and characters that were unnecessary. I think the middle of the film should have been significantly restructured in a way to make the story more focused and actually entertaining.
Overall: This is a very average new Christmas movie that has a lot of interesting ideas, but doesn’t dive into any of them. There’s some action, some Christmas fun, and a good amount of language for a family movie. While it was enjoyable to see a Christmas movie that wasn’t a traditional Christmas movie, it also was just a very generic action movie. If you thought the trailers looked fun, you’ll most likely have a good time with this. If you thought the trailers seemed a little dumb and looked a lot like very average Netflix movies, you’d also be right.
Rating: 3/5
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