SNOW TIME TO DIE

RED ONE J.K. Simmons' Santa gets kidnapped. Luckily, Dwayne Johnson's on hand to save him...

- JAMES HARVEY

If 2022's Violent Night gave us Die Hard in a Santa suit, Jake Kasdan's Red One could be retitled North Pole Has Fallen. The world imagined by Kasdan finds Saint Nick kidnapped two days before Christmas Eve. It's up to Dwayne Johnson's head of security, Callum Drift, and Chris Evans' unscrupulous hacker-for-hire, Jack O'Malley, to hunt down the man in red in time for the big day.

But this is Father Christmas like we've never seen him before. 'As we started to get into it, the thought emerged that we would portray Nick with all of this warmth and charisma, but as a sort of commander figure who runs this giant operation,' Kasdan says. 'We started to think about him like a general, a president, or a head of state. As soon as we started to talk about it in those terms, the obvious first call was J.K. [Simmons].'

Such an important figure, of course, needs protection, and that's where Johnson's character comes in. The head of ELF (Enforcements and Logistics Fortification), Santa's right-hand muscleman is a calculating bruiser one Christmas Eve away from retirement. When Hiram Garcia, who works at Johnson's Seven Bucks Productions, pitched Kasdan the idea, his character formed an important starting point.