‘Red One’ is both a run-of-the-mill Christmas movie, with its accoutrements of flying reindeer, a Father Christmas who delivers presents in one night to all the children in the world, and who also finds the time to be the department store Santa and to preside over a North Pole toy making factory, while also having something creative to say about the mythology surrounding Santa Claus. Tapping indeed into its Danish roots, and especially the figure of Krampus, this vehicle for Dwayne Johnson is an enjoyable enough hybrid of action movie and Christmas film, though its militaristic components, with the idea that Santa has a literal army of security staff around him all the time, is not a comfortable fit, and much of the films jars when a straight-faced The Rock, as Santa’s head of security, considers resigning because there are too many children these days on the naughty list.

Indeed, this soon develops into a treatise on how someone on the naughty list can become a better person and thereby save themselves and indeed the very future of Christmas itself. Saving Christmas is here construed as a military operation. Despite the security detail around him, Santa still manages to get kidnapped, and the Christmas on display in ‘Red One’ which sees an albeit benign Santa (J.K. Simmons) at the mercy of heavies and generals – including a bear with attitude – who keep military discipline around the Christmas schedule, and woe betide anyone who has the audacity to keep the festival off track. Punishment plays a big role, with Krampus, who in folklore is a punitive figure who reprimands those children who are on the naughty list, here a kind of S&M figure whose underground lair is a bit too grim for any children in the audience.

More could also have been made around the tropes here regarding characters who have lost their faith in humanity and/or Christmas, and so require some element of magical transformation in order to have their faith restored. There is no indictment of the sort of soulless materialism that could be said to sit at odds with the Christmas spirit (in contrast to ‘Miracle on 34^th Street’, here Santa is fully at home in the world of commerce, and indeed finds it soulful), and everyone is redeemed at the end, even the naughty-listers and the doubters. Indeed, we don’t really know what exactly the fate would otherwise have been for all these nay-sayers. The film presents at its heart a military operation without knowing exactly what it is attempting to rescue.