Red One (2024)

Red One arrives as a Christmas action comedy with a budget that could fund a small nation's holiday decorations and a critical reception that suggests the decorations were hung upside down. Dwayne Johnson plays Callum Drift, head of North Pole security, who teams with Chris Evans's hacker to rescue a kidnapped Santa. The cast is notably multiethnic, and Lucy Liu's MORA director carries real authority, but the film never pauses to comment on this. Diversity here is simply the furniture of a modern studio production, unremarked and unweaponized. That is worth a modest nod, nothing more.

The film's moral center is a gentle nudge toward niceness. Callum frets about humanity's toxic behavior, the Naughty List grows, and snow globes shatter when people become kinder. A social media influencer gets a mild scolding for cutting in line. These gestures aim at personal conduct, not at systems or structures. There is no critique of wealth, no indictment of capitalism, just a vague wish that people would be more polite. The same restraint applies to gender. Lucy Liu and Kiernan Shipka command their scenes, but the film offers no thesis on power or patriarchy. It is action-comedy spectacle with a light dusting of seasonal morality.

The film's absences are equally instructive. No LGBTQ+ characters or themes appear. Race is never engaged as a subject. Climate change goes unmentioned. Body positivity and neurodivergence are absent. The film invents a mythology around Santa, Krampus, and Grýla, but it makes no revisionist claims about real history. The lecture energy is low, a faint sermon about being nicer that never threatens to overwhelm the CGI. Red One topped the domestic box office in its opening weekend, a fact that feels like a small miracle given its reception. It is a film of modest social consciousness and loud commercial noise, and we are left to classify it accordingly.