The Media Tourist

This screeching Christmas turkey is a bombastic holiday-flick misfire

Red One
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans & J.K. Simmons
Directed by Jake Kasden
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, Nov. 15

Ah, the heartwarming glow of classic Christmas movies! Jimmy Stewart hugging his family and thankful for his friends as Clarence the angel gets his wings… Buddy the Elf convincing New Yorkers to believe as Santa’s sleigh zooms over Central Park… The awesomeness of Miracle on 34^th Street.

And then there’s this, the muck-fest that is Red One, a bombastic holiday-flick misfire that looks like the big-screen equivalent of an especially hideous ugly Christmas sweater, garishly pieced together with a barrage of CGI, forced “buddy comedy” banter and a bizarro collection of frightening sights. It’s a big ho-ho-ho no thanks, a grossly overstuffed Christmas stocking of charmless Yule-adjacent mayhem with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson fighting a giant hag, slamming around hulking snowmen brutes, and getting into a slapping contest with a sneering, goat-faced Nordic Krampus. Oh yeah, and there’s also Santa, ripped from pumping iron, counting carbs, hydrating and running the North Pole like a five-star-general and superstar CEO in charge of a global toy-centric military-industrial complex.  

When Santa, code-named Red One, gets kidnapped, his chief of security, Callum Drift (Johnson) swings into action to find him before a beautiful witch (Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka) can sap his St. Nick life force, using it to imprison and punish everyone who’s ever been on the fabled “naughty list.” Somehow J.K. Simmons got hauled in to play Santa; I kept wishing he’d bark “Not my tempo!” to some hapless kid tapping on his Christmas drum kit. Chris Evans (Captain America in the Marvel-verse) is a mercenary hacker whose shady connections are to blame for the abduction—and who, of course, becomes essential to the Santa search, after, that is, he’s done swiping lollipops from kids, leering at bikini babes on a beach and lusting for a Wonder Woman toy that can be zapped life-size by Drift’s do-dad wrist thingy.

How awful is it all? There are toothless ogres, snarling hellhounds, unsightly elves, heaving steampunk machines, a haunted piano and a dismal Gothic castle where rowdy revelers look like grotesque, rubber-masked drunken rejects from the Star Wars cantina. A snowman’s face gets melted when it’s smushed onto a sizzling grill, like something you might expect to see in a movie like Goodfellas. There’s a smattering of swearing, including an f-bomb that gets diffused at the last millisecond. The whole movie takes place in a kind of alt universe where storybook creatures really exist, which is why the Headless Horseman is rounded up as one of the “usual suspects” after Santa goes missing. If you want to give your little one a nightmare for Christmas, here you go.

Bonnie Hunt seems like she’s in another movie entirely as Mrs. Claus. Lucy Liu practically phones it in in for her scenes as the head of mythological creatures. (So, hey, where’s Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman when you really need ‘em?) Actor/comedian Nick Kroll is a crime-syndicate middleman who gets possessed, Exorcist-style.  Ah, that cozy Christmas charm.

Red One is an Amazon production, originally intended as first of a franchise (oh, dear). Amazon, you know, where you order stuff—like Hot Wheels toy cars, a Monopoly board game and Mattel’s Rock Em Sock Em Robots, which all feature prominently in the plot. Director Jake Kasden’s previous movies include Sex Tape, Bad Teacher and a pair of Jumanji remakes. Screenwriter and producer Chris Morgan was behind the Fast & Furious franchise, Bird Box and Shazam! Fury of the Gods. It’s like they siphoned off glops of those flicks to pour into this one, slopped in a dash of expired eggnog, ran up the production price tag to a gollywhopping $250 million, and then bid all a good night.

The sentimentality is forced, the action muddled and the whole affair grim, void of mirth, bereft of comfort and joy, and with only the slightest smudgy smidge of anything you might even loosely call the spirit of Christmas.  “Haven’t you had enough?” asks one character in the middle of yet another CGI smackdown. After two hours of watching this screeching Christmas turkey flop and flounder around on an IMAX screen, I certainly had.

—Neil Pond

Hooligan kids show a small town the real meaning of Christmas in this holiday yarn with a Sunday School spin

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
Starring Judy Greer and Pete Holmes
Directed by Dallas Jenkins
Rated PG

In theaters Friday, Nov. 9

Based on a Christmas yarn first published in McCall’s magazine in the ‘70s—and later made into a novel—this holiday tale is about a group of unruly, wrong-side-of-the-tracks kids who infiltrate their small town’s nativity play, ultimately showing everyone the real reason for the season.

The ever-versatile Judy Greer is the mom who steps into the fray to direct the wobbly production; standup comedian and actor Pete Holmes plays her helpful husband. The disruptive kids are six scrappy little-rascal siblings regarded as the local bullies, troublemakers and fire-starters. They may not know all the details of Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus, but they dive into the play anyway, motivated by finding out the church provides snacks.

The result: A unique spin on a familiar old story.

Director Dallas Jenkins—whose crowd-funded life-of-Jesus series, The Chosen, is in its fourth season—puts a Sunday School spin on the shenanigans, blending kid-zone humor with a more serious theme about how Christmas is for everyone, including bullies and troublemakers, and how Jesus was all about the poor, the outcast and the marginalized. The movie tells us the town’s longstanding Christmas pageant, now celebrating its 75^th year, had become overly familiar and cookie-cutter predictable, in need of a shakeup and a makeover—suggesting that even faithful churchgoers can sometimes get stuck in a rut and would benefit from a good goosing.

In a couple of scenes we see where the wayward siblings live, in a scrappy house that’s basically a shack, pretty much raising themselves. It’s a not-so-subtle reminder of the humble circumstances described the familiar story of the birth of the Christ child—away in a manger, no crib for a bed, indeed.

The film’s marketing campaign is clearly targeting traditional Christian believers…and any adolescents who might think hearing someone say “butt” or “pussy willow” is tee-hee hilarious. It’s an earnest, sermonizing B-movie that so wants to be another Christmas “classic,” specifically A Christmas Story—from which it borrows some of its retro mojo, including its narration by the now-grown-up version of one of the kids (in this case, former Gilmore Girl Lauren Graham). And maybe it’s just coincidence, but one of the li’l disruptors (Matthew Lamb) looks a lot like bespectacled, fair-haired Ralphie from A Christmas Story.

So, it’s a Christmas story that wants to be A Christmas Story. But it’s more straightforward about the meaning of Christmas—to Christians, anyway—and not Bumpis hounds, leg lamps, turkey leftovers or the risks of shooting an eye out with a BB gun. And it does prod viewers to re-think the origin story central to the Christian faith by seeing it unfold from a new perspective—with a shrieking angel, wise men lugging a cooked ham and a cigar-smoking teenage Mary back-slapping her babydoll, in case infant Jesu is a bit gassy.  

Joy (burp!) to the world, y’all!

—Neil Pond

Hugh Grant is terrifying in his horror-movie debut as a religion-obsessed nutjob

Heretic
Starring Hugh Grant, Chloe East & Sophie Thatcher
Directed by Scott Black & Bryan Woods
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Nov. 8

A pair of earnest young Mormon missionaries gets converted to terror when they come across a strange man who tries to malevolently dismantle their faith. Hugh Grant is a horror-show hoot as the suave psychopath who traps them in a fateful game of choices, setting up a series of diabolical challenges and methodically deconstructing almost everything they once believed as truth.

A24, the studio that brought us such superb freakouts as Men, Lamb, Hereditary, Midsommar and The Witch, delivers another mind-warping detour into something unfathomably unsettling as Grant’s character—known as Mr. Reed—reveals himself as a culturally literate, religion-obsessed psychopath, trying to lead the women to “the one true religion.” And those two missionaries clearly aren’t the first to get caught in his lair…

The unsuspecting proselytizers—both of whom turn out to be more resourceful that they initially seem— are aptly played by Chole East (she was the teen crush in The Fablemans) and Sophie Thatcher (from TV’s Yellowjackets). Grant, of course, is British romcom royalty (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Sense and Sensibility, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Notting Hill), and now a new ringmaster of creepiness.  This is his first bona fide horror flick (no, I’m not counting The Lair of the White Worm, back in 1988), and he kills it as Reed’s suave, smooth, mild-mannered monstrousness unfolds with stabs of highly erudite Brit-wit humor.

Heretic is an intellectually prickly maze of a movie; its tagline is “Question Everything”— like the wooden tabletop puzzle box that hints that what we’re witnessing might be, indeed, manipulation and trickery on an even cosmic scale. The word itself stems from heresy, which means opinions contrary to orthodox religious thought. Organized religion has always looked unfavorably on heresy and heretics, which undermine the “truths” and tenets on which cathedrals, temples and mosques—and empires—are built.

The film not only dissects and dissembles religion, but takes on human existence itself, mixing in ponderables about time, prayer, prophecy, polygamy, psychology, afterlife, miracles, choices, control, board games, hope and how ideas, ideologies and even music are all just “iterations” of things that came before. (Radiohead, Lana Del Rey and Air Supply, here’s looking at you.) How do condoms, porn, Mormon “magic underwear,” butterflies and blueberry pie all figure into the plot?

You’ll find out in this impressively heady “haunted house” movie, which nods to some classic tropes while shaping everything into its own psychologically twisty Mobius Strip, where knowledge only leads to more questions. “The more you know, the less you know” Reed tells the missionaries—and believe me, that’s no comfort for them to hear.

I don’t want to spoil the surprises of Heretic, so maybe the less you know is the way to go. It’s a hellishly wild plunge into raging, slow-burn craziness—and a parable for our current age of misinformation, mistruths and outright lies in high places. There’s some spurting blood and a bit of viscera, yes, but it’s certainly no Saw; it’s smarter and more deviously disturbing than that. A white-knuckle ride that ratchets up the tension with every scene, minute by minute, it’s like a theology master class taught by a madman. It will get under your skin and into your head and stay there after it’s over.

And now, if you ever knock on a door and Hugh Grant answers, with the scent of blueberry pie wafting through the house, you might want to think twice about coming inside.

—Neil Pond

A brutal Mexican cartel boss wants to leave his old life behind—and become a trans woman—in this vibrantly saucy movie musical.

Émilia Perez
Starring  Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón & Selena Gomez
Directed by Jacques Audiard
R

In limited theaters Friday, Nov. 1 (streaming on Netflix Nov. 13)

A fearsome Mexican cartel leader secretly longs to become a woman. A lawyer is stuck in a dead-end job prosecuting mobsters in a system totally rigged to get them off the hook. How can they help each other out?

In this vibrantly bold tale of self-identity, change, atonement and family, Zoe Saldaña (taking a break from the sky-high sci-fi worlds of Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy) is a hardworking junior attorney who gets an offer she can’t refuse, promised unfathomable riches to help the notorious kingpin find his “real life” and leave the old one behind. Soon the legal eagle is flying all over the world to find a surgeon who’ll do the job, keep his mouth shut, and keep everything hidden from Manitas Del Monte’s wife and kids—and his old enemies.

In a bravura performance that’s already getting Oscar Best Actress buzz, real-life openly trans Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascón plays the cartel boss as well as the transgendered woman, Émilia Perez, he exuberantly becomes. The lawyer spreads the coverup, that that the crime lord is dead. Of course, that’s not much of a stretch, in his line of work, and his wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez, below, sizzling with secrets and hidden desires of her own, gets shuttled off for her “safety” to snowy Switzerland.

But the violence of Emilia’s former life comes home to roost when Emilia reenters the world of his wife and kids, who have no idea who she really is (and used to be), and Emilia begins to shelter Jessi and raise their children in the ruse of being their aunt.

Mexican cartels, a she who was a he, a horny kinda-ex-wife and a lawyer caught in the middle…and it’s a musical! In Spanish! Characters burst into song on the streets, in their homes, everywhere. Movie musicals, of course, are nothing new. But I’d wager a Swiss bank account full of ill-gained pesos (if I had one) that next month’s big-screen Wicked adaptation won’t have a number set in a gleaming sex-change clinic, with surgeons and patients merrily crooning about chondrolaryngoplasty—Adam’s apple reduction—and the process of turning a penis into a vagina. And you won’t hear Selena Gomez, on Only Murders in the Building, purring into a phone about an intimate part of her body that, ahem, still “aches” for a former lover. (Hint: It’s not her heart.)

It’s a boldly original, invigoratingly saucy spin on a dramatically charged story with a trio of superlative leads, intermingling elements that don’t often come together on a screen—kinda like Sicario meets Mrs. Doubtfire by way of La La Land. And as Emilia becomes an advocate for victims of cartel violence—that his male counterpart certainly helped perpetuate—the movie’s tone shifts into one of heroics and reparation, signaling another kind of “transition” entirely.

When the streets of Mexico fill with people proclaiming Emilia as a sort of national icon, you can understand why—even if you don’t break into song about Adam’s apples, penises and vaginas.  

—Neil Pond