The Rock’s Christmas Movie Looks Suspiciously Like a ‘South Park’ Episode

Maybe Jerry Seinfeld’s right, maybe movies really are dead. Exhibit A: The trailer for the new Christmas flick Red One, which stars Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, and J.K. Simmons as a distractingly shredded Santa Claus. Say what you will about Tim Allen, at least his Santa didn’t look like he was going to put creatine in your stocking and replace his toy workshop with a CrossFit gym.

Does anybody want to spend their holidays watching the Rock brawl with beefy CGI snowmen, and Captain America attempting to use a dash of Christmas magic to fuck a life-sized Wonder Woman action figure? Sure there have been a lot of bad Christmas films over the years, but at least that movie where Lindsay Lohan gets festive brain damage didn’t cost $250 million, which was reportedly the budget for Red One.

There’s another problem with this movie, too: It was already an episode of South Park.

The plot of Red One finds Johnson playing the leader of the “E.L.F. Task Force,” Callum Drift, who teams up with Jack O’Malley, “the best tracker in the world,” played by Evans to find Santa Claus. Where’s Santa? Well, he’s been kidnapped, and if he isn’t found, there will be no Christmas. 

Johnson has described the movie as “Jumanji meets Miracle on 34th Street meets Hobbs & Shaw with a dash of Harry Potter and sprinkled on top with my all-time favorite Christmas movie, It's a Wonderful Life.” While that sentence is objectively upsetting, it neglects to mention another clear antecedent: “Red Sleigh Down,” the 2002 South Park episode that also involved a group of heroes rescuing Santa from kidnappers. Of course, in South Park, Santa is shot down while passing through Iraq. 

Following Santa’s abduction, Stan, Kyle and Cartman similarly recruit a bearded helper to join the mission — not Chris Evans, but Jesus. 

In the end, Santa is freed and gets to be a gun-toting badass. And it’s hard not to imagine that something similar won’t happen with Red One, otherwise why go out of your way to show how jacked J.K. Simmons is? It’s a classic case of “Chekov’s Santa’s bulging biceps.”

In all fairness to Red One, “Red Sleigh Down” wasn’t the first example of a story in which Santa is kidnapped, lest we forget the B-movie classic Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

But Red One turns the North Pole into a full-on militaristic compound, and uses Santa’s kidnapping as a springboard for an archetypal action movie plot line — which is exactly what South Park did. But, importantly, “Red Sleigh Down” was a satire, a takeoff of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, set at Christmastime. Its juxtaposition of violence and Christmas-y staples was presumably intended to be subversive, and ultimately, funny. Red One, on the other hand, has seemingly mashed these discordant narrative elements together purely to make more money by exploiting both the popularity of Christmas and the success of mindless PG-13 action movies. 

It would have been way better if they’d just introduced the concept that Santa Claus exists in the Fast & Furious universe, and it’s up to Dom Toretto and his team family to rescue him.

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