The heroes of Red One, a glittering lump of yuletide action-comedy coal coming to a multiplex near you, travel the world via secret portals hidden in the back of toy stores. To which any child in the audience might ask, “Wait, there are stores that only sell toys?” Well, not anymore, Timmy. Such brick-and-mortar establishments have largely been wiped out by Amazon, a.k.a. the mega-corporation that bankrolled this movie. To see the company build the lore of a would-be blockbuster around a business model it destroyed is about as galling as, say, Netflix making a sitcom about Blockbuster.

Speaking of the streaming giant, Red One is not a sequel to Red Notice, though it does share a star and a general air of crass commercial indifference with that algorithmic slop. There’s something distinctly Bezosian about its vision of the most wonderful time of the year: Santa Claus, as played by an unfathomably overqualified J.K. Simmons, is a rise-and-grind mogul who hits the gym before climbing onto the sleigh and runs his operation with an efficiency that could put a twinkle in every billionaire’s eye. Early on, the movie touches down in the North Pole, and the place has all the dreamy enchantment of a fulfillment center. The elves, we’re told, work 364 days a year, taking only December 26 off. Like their counterparts at Amazon, they could use a better contract.

At two-sizes-too-small heart, this is a buddy comedy, unboxing and pairing off a couple of stock action figures after Santa is kidnapped by Nordic witch Grýla (Kiernan Shipka). To save Christmas, the big guy’s 300-year-old head of security, Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), must join forces with Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), a slovenly, cynical hacker and deadbeat dad. “Do I look human?” Drift at one point rhetorically asks his mismatched partner, and even ignoring his iconic cartoon physique, the answer is once again “no”: Defaulting to a stony, humorless glower, The Rock is all plastic machismo here. That leaves Evans to pick up the comic slack, which he does with a smidge more New Yawk attitude and pathos than strictly required. Of course, going above and beyond material this shoddy is no great lift. Mostly, his performance leaves behind a warm-and-fuzzy gratitude that Ryan Reynolds wasn’t available.

Imagine a holiday-season answer to Men in Black with more acronyms than jokes. When nu-manji director Jake Kasdan isn’t introducing some new wrinkle in the mythological intelligence agency run by a poker-faced Lucy Liu, he’s bombarding us with gaudy attractions. The CGI stocking stuffers include a trio of malevolent snowmen, a Hot Wheels car magically scaled up to full-sized Lamborghini proportions, and a talking polar bear with no personality. The effects have a garish inconsistency familiar to the age of blockbuster crunch. To subject your eyes to them is to feel pangs of sympathy for the overworked, non-unionized artists who presumably sacrificed a holiday or two to make a release date probably set in stone before the script was written.

Red One Gallery