Red One

What you can't do for money, director Jake Kasdan (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) must have said, accepting Warner's rather enormous cheque to put together the single worst Christmas film I've ever had to endure. $250 million it cost to make, bizarrely enough. Sure, The Rock probably pocketed half of that for his incredible efforts here, but other than his absurd salary demands, there's not a single thing in this utterly shit sandwich of a junk film that looks like it cost more than six bucks. That's how disgustingly rotten this is, straight up.

Red One is Father Christmas. His code name. In this muckraking gooffest, Santa is not corpulent, cosy and kindly humble with a big (cosy) red flannel coat and knee-high leather boots with gold buckles. No, here the plot is exactly the same character as that psychotic music teacher in Whiplash who screams and throws cymbals at people's skulls. This is because the Red One script is consistently atrocious and because a noticeably sad and bored J.K. Simmons never bothers to do anything other than the role he's already done, 100 times over. Santa is stressed, determined, arrogant and a tad smug in his dominant personality. He works out every day, wears sleeveless jumpers and talks very fast. At his side is his bodyguard, Callum Drift (The Rock), who keeps the one-note Santa alive by fending off mischievous admirers and angry elves who wish him harm.

All hell breaks loose when the 300-year-old witch Gryla kidnaps Red One and takes him to her underground lair to build weapons that will kill half the world's children with extracted Santa magic. The only one who can save poor imprisoned Father Christmas is Callum Drift and his far too short, dark red leather jacket ... And Chris Evans' character of course, who is a hacker. A 46-year-old hacker who wears sunglasses indoors and who is the only one who can recognise the old Santa-kidnapping super-witch. The stoically correct, obsessively respectable and rigid Callum must now try to work with the smug, irresponsibly childish hacker Jack O'Malley to rescue Father Christmas in what is best described as the second worst film of the year.

We've all seen Christmas films that neither aspire to any shiny golden statuettes nor that we remember a month after seeing them. Most dedicated Christmas films are intended to spread a bit of cosy cheer in the run-up to Boxing Day and not much more. But of course, that doesn't mean putting together $250 million worth of stories that feel like an episode of a green screen children's programme. Because that's exactly how it feels. Everything is recorded in front of a large green screen and then filled up with computer-generated rubbish with a real AI feel. The effects in Red One look like a joke, the environments look like rubbish and the premise itself is so tired and stupid that even my kids didn't want to finish watching it.

It's also noticeable that The Rock has stopped caring, completely. He could have easily given his character Callum Drift some life, here. A bit of nuance, an ounce of personality. There's nothing in the script that doesn't tell you that he could have tucked in a bit of quirk, a bit of grit and spiced up an overly stiff, one-note character to build some sort of dynamic with Chris Evans' nagging. The Rock, however, does none of that. He cruises through every scene with lines he's repeated 2,000 times before, and he does it with the kind of stone-cold charisma that once made him the world's biggest film star. Tragic, is what it is. That film companies pay this amount for ultra-garbage like this is tragic. Nothing else.