Red One: Too much naughty, not enough nice

Red One (2024) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, and rather generously, for scary violence, profanity and unnecessary earthiness

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

This movie is a mess.

 

For awhile, it’s an entertaining mess. Scripters Chris Morgan and Hiram Garcia have fun blending numerous Christmas/Santa Claus myths, and their concept of the high-tech North Pole operation is a golly-gee-willikers smile. Production designer Bill Brzeski clearly went to town, and the visual effects folks do marvelous things with elves and Santa’s awesomely huge reindeer.

 

Having successfully filled in as a mall Santa for a day, the actual Mr. Claus (J.K. Simmons,
right) is escorted back to his reindeer-drivn sleigh by security chief Callum Drift
(Dwayne Johnson).

I’m also charmed by the notion that the actual Santa Claus, code-named “Red One” (J.K. Simmons, at his fatherly best) occasionally fills in for shopping mall duties, because he enjoys “mingling with the people.” This notion cheekily adds weight to a parent’s insistence, to a doubtful child, that yes; that fellow in the chair could be the actual Santa.

I also was willing to roll with a plot line that involves Santa being kidnapped by the evil Christmas Witch, aka Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), to prevent him from making the rounds on the all-important night, while replacing his gift-giving with her own nefarious scheme.

 

But by about this point, the script’s disparate elements begin to burst at the seams.

 

Backing up a bit, the first act establishes the longstanding bond between Santa and his head of security: Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), commander of the North Pole’s E.L.F. team (Enforcement, Logistics and Fortification). After centuries of faithful service, Callum has grown disenchanted with humanity’s rising willingness to behave badly — without concern — thus winding up on the Naughty List.

 

Santa, being Santa, has faith.

 

“Every decision,” he insists, in Simmons’ best, wise-guidance tone, “is an opportunity to do the right thing.”

 

Elsewhere, chronic gambler and expert “fixer” Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans) has helped an unknown party track an unusual seismic disturbance ... not realizing that it’s Santa’s reindeer taking off, after his shopping mall gig. Said unknown party turns out to be Gryla; Jack has unwittingly given her the means to find the concealed North Pole, and orchestrate the aforementioned kidnapping.

 

This absolutely horrifies Zoe (Lucy Liu), head of the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority (M.O.R.A.), an umbrella organization charged with protecting and defending the mythological world, from Bigfoot to the Easter Bunny. Santa’s absence, with only one day before Christmas, is a crisis of the highest magnitude.

 

Callum and his team quickly locate and enlist Jack, to help them recover Santa: a mission initially pooh-poohed by the skeptical mortal. (We briefly see his kid version in this film’s prologue, played by Wyatt Hunt, as a precocious disbeliever in Santa.) A brief encounter with Cal’s second-in-command, Garcia — a massive talking polar bear — soon sets that straight.

 

Santa Camp: Far more than mere ho-ho-ho

Santa Camp (2022) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated TV-MA, for profanity and occasional sexual candor

Available via: HBO Max

By Derrick Bang

It was bad enough when ultra-conservative American Christians were confronted with the notion that Jesus, as a Middle Eastern Jew, almost certainly would have had olive skin, brown to black hair, and brown eyes.

 

Despite his big heart and can-do spirit, Chris (center) can't
help feeling out of place amid a sea of lily-white
Santas and Mrs. Clauses.

No surprise: They rejected this suggestion.

(I’ve always felt that composer Alfred Burt’s poignant seasonal song, 1951’s “Some Children See Him,” states the case quite eloquently.)

 

But broadening the appearance of Santa Claus? 

 

That’s an even tougher sell in this country.

 

Nick Sweeney’s delightful documentary would have been a charmer had he solely detailed the traditional activities of the annual “Santa Camp” that takes place each August in the New Hampshire woods: a two-day “crash course” devoted to helping professional Santas, Mrs. Clauses and elves learn the tricks of their trades, in order to become the best possible version of the characters who populate malls and department stores every year.

 

He also opens with a hilarious title credits montage, which will be familiar to any parent.

 

But Sweeney’s film dovetailed with the New England Santa Society’s decision that this would be no ordinary year, after a pre-event discussion that revolved around the increasingly obvious possibility that the Jolly Red Elf might have a “diversity problem.”

 

This wasn’t an overnight decision. As Sweeney depicts in brief archive footage, the Mall of America faced considerable wrath when retired Army captain Larry Jefferson became the venue’s first Black Santa, back in 2016. The online rants were bad enough, but they were encouraged by the racist, bloviating talking heads at (where else?) Fox News.

 

Which continues to this day, spearheaded in great part by television journalist Megyn Kelly’s stubborn declaration that Santa “must be white.”

 

Although casual myth-making generally credits the American Santa to England’s Father Christmas and the Dutch figure of Sinterklass, actual history traces the legend back to the monk St. Nicholas, born roughly around 280 A.D. in — wait for it — Patara, near Myrna in modern-day Turkey. (Care to guess what color his skin likely would have been?)

 

The “whiteness” of our American Santa results from two much more recent sources: political cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose January 1863 illustration for Harper’s Weekly established the mold; and Coca-Cola execs, who in 1931 hired illustrator Haddon Sundblom to paint Santa for Christmas advertisements. Drawing inspiration from Clement Clark Moore’s 1822 poem, commonly known as “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” Sundblom firmly established Santa as a warm, happy, elderly white guy with rosy cheeks, a full beard, twinkling eyes and laugh lines.