Santa Claus – code name: Red One – is kidnapped by a commando in his hidden world under a dome at the North Pole. His bodyguard and head of security, to free him and save Christmas, which is now upon us, will have to team up with a super hacker who may know the identity of the person who organized the kidnapping and therefore the location of Santa Claus.

With a screenplay by the tried and tested Chris Morgan, author of chapters 3 to 8 of The Fast and the Furious, Red One begins by telling the story of a Santa Claus, played by a lazy J. K. Simmons, who, just before Christmas Eve, takes the traditional photos with children in a shopping center, the place – he will later say curiously – with the most feelings on Earth. Immediately after, as if it were the President of the United States, a team of special forces takes care of his ‘exfiltration’ from the pleasant place accompanied by his faithful bodyguard close to voluntary retirement, played by the massive Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) who co-produces the film with his Seven Bucks Productions chaired by Hiram Garcia, his long-time collaborator, who also signs the story of Red One.

The beginning of the film therefore, with this curious idea that shows a federal agency (obviously a US exclusive) dedicated to preserving the “mythological world” including that of Santa Claus, is captivating and well orchestrated. But as soon as the first of the second plots begins, with the kidnapping of Red One, things start to get tangled especially in relation to the convoluted subplots that are continuously opened and that must have the right attention.

So, to understand who commissioned the kidnapping of Santa Claus, The Rock’s character, Callum Drift, follows the trail of a hacker who gave the secret location of the North Pole of the city hidden under an invisible dome of Santa Claus. Thus comes into play the figure of the nice rascal Jack O’Malley, played by Chris Evans, who will be forced to work arm in arm with Callum Drift. Naturally the two hate each other because they are opposites in character. But only initially because, as every good film about friendship stories wants, in saving Christmas they will find themselves much closer than they thought. Thanks also to the inclusion of another story, between father and son, with the character of the messed up Jack O’Malley who obviously doesn’t get anything right with the teenager, for example by not showing up to a final exam he cared so much about.

Uno Rosso (a title that still sounds a bit strange) uses comedy tones throughout this part without ever really being one, also because the action movie has to make itself heard and bursts in with chases that, fortunately, are interposed with some overly verbose passages between the strange pair of cops whose chemistry, honestly, from an acting point of view, is not so visible.

In all this busyness, the film forgets about Santa Claus – indeed, paradoxically, it focuses much more on his adoptive stepbrother, that Krampus who harks back to the mythology of the German-speaking areas of Europe – so much so that he will only reappear at the end with the atmosphere of classic Christmas films that shows itself intermittently like a faulty light bulb. Also because the refined magic of Christmas can hardly be felt in a hyper-technological film where the fantasy world is relegated almost exclusively to the reindeer who, moreover, are almost the only females – they are addressed as “girls” – in one of the most masculine films of recent times if we exclude the marginality of Santa’s wife (Bonnie Hunt) and the characters played by Lucy Liu who does not escape her martial arts stereotype and by an underused Kiernan Shipka.