Much of the humor of RedOne It is based on Dwayne Johnson wishing his co-stars ‘Merry Christmas’ with the most serious face in the world. He is supposed to be Santa’s bodyguard and there is nothing he cares about more than the joy of children – “Save Christmas” is another thing he often says – so his intimidating physique establishes a contrast something like “hilarious” with his martial attitude. Humor is based, therefore, on the complicity of the public and on that media image that The Rock has been methodically building for nearly twenty years. Image where precisely the mixture of fierceness and affability comes together, and image on which it depends RedOne with desperation. If it didn’t work, the movie would have nothing.
This combination is what has led Johnson to be established as the natural successor to Arnold Schwarzenegger, because they both know how to laugh at themselves. With some nuance, however. Johnson, for example, began to play with the impression he aroused in the public a little more quickly: when he was still far from being a total star he performed for Southland Tales (2006) to a character inspired by his figure. And, unlike Schwarzenegger with Terminator or Conan the Barbarian, we don’t know Johnson for having “characters”, but he is always him. Dwayne Johnson, The Rock, former WWE wrestler, chaining new and interchangeable identities.
So in RedOne He plays a certain Callum Drift – Santa Claus’s bodyguard who discovers that his boss has been kidnapped on Christmas Eve – but above all he plays Dwayne Johnson. In addition, he produces the film with his Seven Bucks label: a company that owes its name to the measly “seven dollars” he had in his pocket just before trying his luck in the WWE and beginning to win the love of the United States. It’s an anecdote that you probably know if you’ve seen Young Rockthe series produced by Johnson himself that is based on his own life and has been extended to three seasons. A monument to his ego? It may be, but it is a monument that has only been possible because, in fact, people love it. Almost as much as he loves himself.
Only in RedOne something strange happens. Johnson repeats his gestures, balances with the usual care the number of his character’s smiles and the tone with which he has to deliver his lapidary phrases, he remains committed to making everything synonymous with great family entertainment… and even then it doesn’t work. In fact RedOne It is a horrible film, only capable of stirring indifference and boredom, and of proclaiming with wild splendor the loss of any charm.
Something is happening with The Rock
There is a clear bridge between RedOne and a film titled Red alertbeyond the similarity between titles. The original title of this action film that Johnson starred in with Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds was Red Noticeand it may well be the most categorical triumph of The Rock’s career. Exactly three years have passed since its launch in streaming and Red alert It remains the most viewed film in Netflix history: more than 364 million hours watched. A savage thing that may have had a not so good consequence for the platform, because Red alert It was also the most expensive movie on Netflix at the time. It had cost $200 million, no less.
How he ended up “compensating”, since Red alert Netflix has strengthened the habit that its blockbusters They have absolutely insane budgets. The invisible agent —with the same Chris Evans who replies to Johnson in RedOne— cost another 200 million, and on March 14, Netflix premieres electrical status with Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt covered by an investment of, let’s take a breath, 320 million dollars. It is up to Netflix to assess whether this budget increase is profitable, but what should matter to us now – beyond the fact that in these films we are unable to see the money anywhere – is that at the end of 2021 there were compelling reasons to confirm Johnson as a total star. Everyone really liked him, enough to overlook the disappointment at the box office he had suffered shortly before Red alert.
Jungle Cruise It was a Disney movie that had cost the same as Red alertand that in the pandemic context it could barely cover its budget through theaters. Although we have forgotten that it existed, it was a decisive film for Johnson due to its link with an important project that had been brewing for years: perhaps aware that he needed an iconic character to be the new Schwarzenegger, The Rock wanted a superhero. Jaume Collet-Serra, director of Jungle Cruisehe was going to repeat with Johnson to Black Adam. The movie that was the beginning of the end. The one responsible for Johnson’s love affair with the public breaking down.
Black Adam was originally going to be the villain of Shazam!a film that DC released in 2019. But Johnson believed that this character deserved a movie all to himself, and also did not consider Zachary Levi’s character as a worthy enemy. These self-parodying narcissistic judgments unleashed a perfect storm: Black Adam materialized at a time of power vacuum at DC, so Johnson was able to orchestrate through Seven Bucks the return of Henry Cavill as Superman, promising in the post-credits scene of Black Adam an epic confrontation with his antihero. Everything went to hell when James Gunn was promoted to the new leader of DC Studios at the end of 2022, with his own plans for Superman. Cavill’s return did not materialize, and the adjacent box office collapse of Black Adam It made everything more embarrassing.
Johnson wanted to inaugurate a saga within DC with Black Adamdesigned for your exclusive display. The collection did not allow it, and also led to the wrath of Warner when Johnson leaked false data to the press about the numbers of his film. Since then we have seen a decline in Johnson’s career. Aware of how his image has been ruined in the industry, The Rock has hastily made peace with Vin Diesel to return to Fast & Furiousand has tangled with Disney in the simultaneous production of the sequel to Moana (premieres this November 29) and its remake in real action, where it would be Maui again. He has also done RedOne. A film from Amazon MGM Studios that, what a surprise, has cost 250 million dollars.
Coal for Christmas
The absurd budget of RedOne It is not only explained by the inertia that Johnson had been carrying, but by other even more shocking reasons. The story is based on an idea by Hiram García, brother of Johnson’s ex-wife Dany García, with whom he founded Seven Bucks in 2012. Hiram had once been The Rock’s personal assistant, but he ended up being promoted to leader of Seven Bucks and is the main producer of RedOne. According to a source The Wrap which explained why the filming had been such a disaster, “I had gone from making his protein shakes to running his company.”
García’s inexperience was not the only thing that raised the budget of RedOne. Until then, Johnson had a certain bad reputation for his behavior on set, but everything was exacerbated in this co-production with Amazon that Warner Bros. distributes internationally. Johnson was late every day by default after spending several hours in the gym, and had the annoying habit of urinating in water bottles that he left lying around. His attitude led to the budget going from 50 million to 200 more, and in short it is something that must be kept in mind to gauge why RedOne offers the filthy experience it offers.
RedOne It is another artifact delimited according to Johnson’s hunches, according to his way of understanding entertainment cinema. Hiram García came up with the idea of kidnapping Santa Claus as a possible twist to the Christmas imagination, which Chris Morgan (regular screenwriter of Fast & Furious) took care of specifying. This could provide one of the few virtues of the proposal, since basically what they wanted to do is “militarize” everything that we associate with the North Pole, and bring the associated mythology closer to superheroic coordinates. This is what leads to the fact that JK Simmons’ Santa Claus (called “Nick”, after Saint Nicholas) is not an obese man, but a guy who spends 12 months beating himself up in the gym in disciplined preparation to distribute all the gifts possible when Christmas Eve arrives. A typically The Rock occurrence.
In the same vein, characters from European folklore that border these festivities – such as Krampus, or the Witch Gryla played by Kiernan Shipka – become interchangeable villains of blockbusterfrom the same logic that presents an anthropomorphic polar bear as The Rock’s right-hand man. It is not unreasonable that at some point along the long path RedOne —its pre-production began before it was released Black Adam— this movie could have been good, but that’s not the case by any means. No one, except perhaps a trying-too-hard Dwyane Johnson, seems to want to be in RedOne. Not even director Jake Kasdan (The Rock’s accomplice in the last two Jumanji) nor those in charge of the clumsiest digital effects of the season, spoiling action scenes always wrapped (or camouflaged?) in darkness.
The cast also does not try very hard to dignify a script allergic to taking this monumental idiocy with the minimum of hooliganism. We could talk in this about the waste of Simmons or how completely lost Lucy Liu and Bonnie Hunt are – there are times when they don’t even know where to look in their shots – although it is probably more productive to highlight Evans for how the script places responsibility on his shoulders. to emit “Christmas spirit”. That is, the cynical bounty hunter he plays has a dramatic arc to resolve during his alliance with Johnson, destined to be a better father and celebrate Christmas as he deserves.
As a consequence, Evans has to deal with the most regrettable dialogues, because in his plea for an essential naivety – the one that pushes us to have the best feelings now that these dates are approaching – he does not stop accidentally gloating about how dead she is. RedOne. The film then shows what was behind Johnson’s media persona during all these years. And since there was only calculation—a calculation that was easy to collapse with just a couple of stumbles—well, that’s how unpleasant it is. RedOneand it is so opportune that it is released with enough time so that, when Christmas comes, we have been able to forget it completely.
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