Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans Save Christmas

Dwayne Johnson's action-fantasy comedy Yuletide, Red Oneis not to be confused with his 2021 crime action comedy, Red warning. The new film is getting a wide theatrical release, for starters, while the previous one went straight to Netflix, was at the top of the most-streamed charts for a minute and then was never talked about again, almost as if it had ever existed.

The pop-cultural imprint of Jake Kasdan's laborious Christmas entry, as he insistently shouts “Next-Gen Christmas Classic!” for you, it seems unlikely to be much different. This is a boring, high-concept, CG-saturated film that lacks heart and infectious humor, even if it eventually huffs and puffs until it reaches some intensity.

Fast and furious Franchise veteran Chris Morgan's script, based on a story by fellow producer Hiram Garcia, feels like the result of a meeting in which an overenthusiastic young man on the studio's development team said, “Hey, let's do Elfbut with a kidnapping plot and lots of cool technology!”

The film pairs Johnson and Chris Evans as an unlikely duo on a globe-trotting mission to track down JK Simmons' kidnapped Santa Claus (codename “Red One”) in time for the jolly bearded boy to board the sleigh and save Christmas. It is full of mythology and magic, yet remains stubbornly non-magical.

Evans plays Jack O'Malley, an unscrupulous opportunist introduced as a chatty preteen (Wyatt Hunt) who collects money from his cousins ​​in exchange for what he claims is definitive proof that Santa Claus doesn't exist. Thirty years later, he grabs other people's coffees from the bar counter before heading home to a bank of computer monitors from which he surfs the dark web, operating as the world's largest paid hacker/tracker, under the alias “The Wolf”.

Johnson plays Callum Drift, head of the North Pole Enforcement, Logistics and Fortification (ELF, geddit?) security team responsible for protecting Santa Claus. Simmons' Nick, as Cal affectionately addresses him, likes to make the rounds of department stores before the big deliveries each year. The film presents him as a president of the United States, with a Secret Service motorcade escorting him from the mall to a hangar where his team of digitally rendered reindeer are ready for takeoff, hitched to a golden sleigh fashioned like a futuristic chariot .

Once airborne, they go into hyperspeed and return to the North Pole, a domed super city with advanced technological capabilities but run by elves who look uncannily like mutant Yodas in a child labor factory. Santa greets Mrs. Claus (Bonnie Hunt) before diving into his gym routine, bench-lifting heavy weights to get in peak shape for the big night.

The only reason Santa frowns is Cal's decision, after a few centuries of working together, to step down, making this their last Christmas together. Unlike Nick, Cal can no longer see the good in people: “I love children, but adults are killing me.” For the first time, the Naughty List is longer than the Nice List, and Cal complains that people don't even care.

Meanwhile, Jack is paid handsomely by an anonymous employer to hack into the intercontinental seismic surveillance system. He identifies a North Pole entry point that has remained hidden for centuries, and before long, a highly coordinated tactical unit has penetrated the dome and made off with Red One while Cal is chasing the decoys.

This emergency pushes MORA, the Mythological Surveillance and Restoration Authority (AS many acronyms), to take action. The organization's director, Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu), tracks down the supposedly untraceable Wolf in what seems like seconds, and Jack is determined to team up with Cal to unmask the kidnappers and save Santa Claus.

Hot on the heels of Liu's fantastic work in Steven Soderbergh's haunted house film, Presence (opening January 24), the utterly generic role she's given here is one of the many disheartening things Red One. Even when Zoe manages to kick some ass in a fight scene, the action cuts to the armored guys almost immediately.

This isn't surprising, given how much testosterone is clogging the arteries of this aggressively charmless film: from passionate Santa Claus to security teams equipped with high-tech hardware and cool vehicles, from Transformers-like toy tricks for fights that push the boundaries of PG-13 violence.

And that's before we even get to the muscular goat-man Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), Santa's adoptive half-brother. This Dark Lord of Winter defected long ago to a bleak German castle in the Black Forest, guarded by hellhounds, where his favorite nocturnal ritual is a face-punching contest with the volunteers of his court of monsters.

This is a film that aims for mythological intrigue and rollicking adventure, but ends up more often in leaden-footed bloat, appropriately accompanied by Henry Jackman's hyperventilating score. It's always busy but rarely fun. The fantasy environments have all the charm of the fairy kingdom at the center of the earth in Kenneth Branagh's immediately forgotten film Artemis Fowl. The North Pole's non-human workers, such as talking penguins and a burly polar bear – neither of which are in danger of being mistaken for real animals – add a modicum of fun.

Just as Krampus hails from the Christmas folklore of Germany, Austria and other parts of Alpine Europe, Morgan's script also incorporates the Icelandic legend of the Christmas Witch Grýla (Kiernan Shipka in a role that begs Björk), a shape-shifter of 900 years old who transforms from a hideous ogress into a devilish girl who looks a lot like her M3GAN. But there is no place for the delicious whimsy of that robot thriller in this boring world.

The interlude that comes closest to eliciting laughs is the brief appearance of Nick Kroll as Ted, head of a security force of death mercenaries known as the Karmanians. (If you think there's a Kardashian allusion there, you'll be waiting for a joke that doesn't happen.) When Cal and Jack arrive at Ted on a beach in Aruba, he is suspended in mid-air by his ankles, possessed by the demonic voice of Grýla. But the funny Kroll isn't around long enough to increase the levity.

That job falls mostly on the shoulders of Evans, who deserves better and can only do so much with dumb dialogue. Johnson, who reunites with his director in two Jumanji sequel, he's on straight man duty, looking serious and determined throughout, until the mechanics of the plot give him reason to smile again.

Both Krampus and Grýla, who commands a unit of lethal giant snowmen and apparently has 13 children who kill on command, are villains whose key political difference with Santa Claus is their focus on punishing those on the Naughty List rather than rewarding those who qualify as kind.

Jack, unsurprisingly, is a bad “Level 4” Lister, whose bad example has managed to rub off on his teenage son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel), despite him being a neglectful father who almost never spends time with him. There's a lot of unfunny banter between the jaded Cal and the cynical Jack, but if you haven't guessed both characters' heartbreaking turns well before the final scenes, then you probably still believe in Santa Claus.

This festive entry, which could almost have been called A fast and furious Christmasit's so bad, artificial and overlong that it should cure children of any belief in magic. It's a great example of the way CG effects have impoverished the imaginations of many contemporary filmmakers, making anything possible, but too often at the expense of the human heartbeat. Anyway, Red One it's the equivalent of a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking.