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RED ONE

Producers: Hiram Garcia, Dwayne Johnson, Dany Garcia, Chris Morgan, Jake Kasdan and Melvin Mar   Director: Jake Kasdan   Screenplay: Chris Morgan   Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, J.K. Simmons, Kiernan Shipka, Bonnie Hunt, Kristofer Hivju, Nick Kroll, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Wesley Kimmel, Wyatt Hunt, Marc Evan Jackson   Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios

Grade: D

Christmas movies used to be good-hearted evocations of the holiday.  Now they’re likely to be either crass comedies or frenetic action movies.  Jake Kasdan’s “Big Red” manages to be both.  Bombastic and obnoxious—but with a sickeningly sweet dose of sentiment at the end—this charmless, CGI-heavy behemoth is enough to make you dread the coming season.

The set-up involves the kidnapping of a surprisingly slim Santa (the ubiquitous J.K. Simmons) from his gargantuan North Pole compound on Christmas Eve.  That sends his head of security Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson) who, following the standard-issue playbook, is on the verge of retirement (though in his case after hundreds of years of service), into overdrive to rescue him before the Big Day is ruined.  When his boss Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu), head of the unit that protects mythological beings, somehow discovers that the master hacker who pinpointed Santa’s location for the kidnappers was the Wolf, aka Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans, who initially feigns a Boston accent but soon drops the effort), they compel him to join Callum in the hunt, mismatched buddy-cop style, even though he doesn’t know who his employer was. 

Without much trouble, however, they compel one of her confederates (Nick Kroll, in a particularly embarrassing cameo) to identify the culprit as Grýla (Kiernan Shipka), the Christmas witch.  She has an elaborate, virtually incomprehensible scheme to punish all the “naughty” people in the world by imprisoning them forever in magical snow globes.  That would certainly include Jack, a notorious ne’er-do-well who’s ignored his son Dylan (Wesley Kimmel), despite the pleas of his ex-wife Olivia (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) that he show some interest in the boy.  (Even as a kid played by Wyatt Hunt, as we see in a prologue, Jack was a problem, fleecing his cousins with promises to prove Santa didn’t exist.)

The duo’s search for “Nick” is a series of misadventures made gruesome by lots of comic-book violence and a crushing load of CGI (the visual effects supervised by Jerome Chen).  The latter begins even before Jack is thrown into the equation, with the introduction of Santa’s super-sized reindeer, who easily go into hyperspeed mode whisking Santa’s sleigh back and forth. 

But after Callum and Jack become a pair, it’s taken to a whole new level.  Callum can shift his size in fights, and also has the power to turn toy cars into real ones for chase purposes and toy robots into Transformers-like giants. The boys are attacked by a trio of what can only be called abominable snowmen on a sunny beach, critters that can literally ice a victim to death and can be defeated only by…well, you’ll have to find out for yourself, as the heroes must.  They sneak into the lair of Santa’s half-brother Krampus (Kristofer Hivju), a gnarly beast with demonic horns on its head and a gang of equally hideous followers, in search of the witch, who we later learn was once the creature’s wife.  Back at the North Pole matters are in the hands of Harlow and Callum’s lieutenant Garcia (Reinaldo Faberelle), who happens to be an anthropomorphic polar bear. 

That only touches the tip of the effects on display, which frankly aren’t top-drawer, perhaps because the movie, though expensive, was originally designed to stream on Prime Video until it was decided that money was to be made by releasing it to theatres.  And that’s overlooking the pointless business of the witch putting imposters in the place of characters like Mrs. Claus (Bonnie Hunt)—a digression that goes nowhere.

Of course, Chris Morgan’s screenplay provides plenty of mirthless banter between the stars, delivered in his usual stentorian fashion by Johnson and with such a lackadaisical air by Evans that he appears to be putting as little effort as possible into collecting his paycheck.  (In a way you can understand his lack of enthusiasm since he’s playing against Johnson, who at one point asks him, “Do I look human?” and you’re likely to reply in the negative.)  Liu, trying to keep a straight face throughout, is completely wasted, as is Hunt; Simmons is smilingly bland as this fitness-freak Santa.

Naturally all the mayhem leads to a big climactic battle as Grýla tries to take off in Santa’s sleigh, bearing a huge cache of snow globes, on her nefarious mission.  In the course of the brawl she transforms from her Shipka shape into a gargantuan CGI thingy that swirls and surges like a badly-drawn twister.  By this time Dylan has been drawn into the plot so that he and Jack can enjoy a saccharine father-and-son reunion and a rescued Santa can speechify about everyone being a mixture of naughty and nice, and how we all should make the right choices whenever we can.  Even Krampus shows up to prove that there’s some good in him, too.  The attempt to add some uplift to the pandemonium that’s preceded it comes off like a lead balloon, especially since Callum’s decision to stay on after all—“for the kids”—threatens a possible sequel.

“Red One”—the code name for Nick among his security detail—is visually unattractive, not merely because of the wall-to-wall CGI but the overbright production design by Bill Brzeski and costumes by Michael Crow, as well as Dan Mindela’s glaring cinematography.  Kasdan and his trio of editors (Mark  Helfrich, Steve Edwards and Tara Timpone) try to pump things up, but at more than two hours the movie brutally overstays its welcome, and the pulverizing score by Henry Jackson makes the excess worse.

With a raft of good Christmas movies out there—some true classics, others serviceably pleasant—one would be well advised to skip this bloated, frantic, boring misfire.  Follow Santa’s advice and choose wisely.   

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A REAL PAIN

Producers: Dave McCary, Ali Herting, Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg, Jennifer Semler and Ewa Puszczyńska   Director: Jesse Eisenberg   Screenplay: Jesse Eisenberg   Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, Daniel Oreskes   Distribution: Searchlight Pictures

Grade: B

If one were forced to categorize Jesse Eisenberg’s road trip film, tragicomedy probably fits best.  But “A Real Pain” is only fitfully funny, and the drama it depicts in its characters pales beside that they are contemplating from many years’ distance.  It does, however, portray both in a tone that allows for some dark humor and sharp observation. 

Eisenberg’s script shares its basic premise with Julia von Heinz’s recent “Treasure,” in which an American journalist (Lena Dunham) dragged her hesitant father, a Holocaust survivor played by Stephen Fry, on a journey through Poland in an attempt to recover her family history.  Here the travelers are the Kaplan cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), who have been left a bequest by their much beloved, recently deceased, grandmother Dory, also a Holocaust survivor, to make a similar trip together.  The purpose is to immerse them, to some extent at least, in her background, but also, it would seem, to encourage them to rediscover the brotherly closeness they’d once enjoyed.

Despite that earlier camaraderie, they’ve grown up to be very different.  David, though skittish and unconfident, is the responsible one, with a solid job in New York City (digital advertising), along with a loving wife and son.  Benji, on the other hand, is a drug-addicted slacker, living with his mother in Binghamton and, we eventually learn, a self-destructive bent.  Yet he’s outgoing, easily charming everyone he encounters in spite of a habit of being honest with them, sometimes brutally so. 

David, a fastidious planner, has booked them for a group tour of Poland that will allow them to detach themselves for a separate trip to their grandmother’s erstwhile home town.  Their meeting at the airport for their departure is effusive, though the fact that Benji’s been there people-watching for hours takes David aback.  At the Warsaw hotel, to which Benji has mailed a packet of choice weed, they meet James (Will Sharpe), the intense British historian who will lead the tour, and their fellow journeyers: recently-divorced Marcia (Jennifer Grey), remaking her life after coming back to New York from California; older middle-class couple Mark and Diane (Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy); and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), who converted to Judaism after enduring the Rwandan genocide.

All of the group members are spotlighted briefly along the way as they pass through sites that James chooses as emblematic of the Jewish experience in Poland—a memorial to the resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto, a Jewish cemetery, the old Jewish quarter in Lublin, the Majdanek concentration camp near the city—and the actors take maximum advantage of the opportunities, as when Michal Dymek’s camera catches each face as they pass the opening to the camp’s gas chamber.  But still they’re portrayed largely in terms of their interactions with the cousins, and particularly Benji, whose oversized personality, attractive but often off-putting—fascinates them, leading them to embrace even his most outrageous ideas, like posing as fighters beside the sculpted resistance heroes in the Warsaw memorial.  Benji even shames James into admitting that his constant recitation of facts is inappropriate at sites, like the cemetery, where silence would be welcome.

But it’s the complicated relationship between the cousins that’s the fulcrum of the narrative.  David is often embarrassed and apologetic about Benji’s actions, and upset when Benji belittles him or does things that undermine the smoothness of the trip, like neglecting to wake him at a train station where they were scheduled to disembark.  A train ride is also involved in one of Benji’s outbursts about riding the tracks so comfortably when Jews were once crammed in cattle cars on their way to death camps.

The cousins’ tangled bond is nicely caught in the screenplay and direction, but it’s fully brought to life by the two lead performances.  In many respects Eisenberg is doing familiar shtick, but he does it with considerable nuance while ceding center stage in great measure to Culkin, who manages to capture poignantly both his character’s manic charisma and the profound sadness beneath the exterior.  When, having found where Dory once lived and finding the current occupants not terribly welcoming, they fly back to New York and part at the airport, each resuming his life, the viewer is left to ponder what has changed in their understanding of the past, each other, and themselves.

Simply shot by Dymek, edited without frills by Robert Nassau, and scored almost completely with excerpts of Chopin played by pianist Trvi Erez, “A Real Pain” nimbly juggles confronting historical horror and coming to terms with familial relationships that have evolved over time.  Serious at its core but seizing opportunities for bleak humor, it represents a substantial accomplishment for both multi-hyphenate Eisenberg and the mercurial Culkin.