Red One—Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Chris Evans’ action movie about rescuing a missing Santa Claus to save Christmas—is being bombarded with negative reviews.

Directed by Jumanji helmer Jake Kasdan, Red One opens in theaters on Friday, November 15. The Red One review embargo lifted Wednesday, however, and movie critics aren’t too impressed by the film in early reviews.

The official logline for Red One reads, “After Santa Claus—Code Name: RED ONE—is kidnapped, the North Pole’s Head of Security (Johnson) must team up with the world’s most infamous bounty hunter (Evans) in a globe-trotting, action-packed mission to save Christmas.”

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Red One also stars J.K. Simmons as Santa Claus, Bonnie Hunt as Mrs. Claus and Kristofer Hivju as Krampus. The cast of Red One also includes Lucy Liu, Kiernan Shipka and Mary Elizabeth Ellis.

As of Wednesday, Rotten Tomatoes critics have collectively given Red One a 35% “rotten” rating based on 20 reviews.

The rating, of course, could change for the better or worse once more critics see the film and post their reviews before the film opens on November 15.

What Are Individual Critics Saying About ‘Red One’?

Owen Gleiberman of Variety is among the top Rotten Tomatoes critics who panned Red One, writing “Red One could almost be the movie version of Vampire Assassin 4. It’s that busy and bumptious, that overstuffed with cheesy digital effects, that generically derivative a piece of violent kitsch.”

David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter also gave Red One a “rotten” review, writing, This is a high-concept, CG-saturated bore that lacks heart and infectious humor, even if it huffs and puffs its way to a little poignancy in the end.”

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Additionally, New York Magazine/Vulture’s Alison Wilmore’s “rotten” review of the film notes, “If Red One were a disaster, it’d be more interesting. Instead, it’s a technically passable action-comedy transparently stitched together from parts scavenged from other movies.”

Despite the smattering of negative reviews, Red One did manage to impress some of RT’s top critics, if only slightly.

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As such, William Bibbiani of The Wrap writes, “It all averages out to slightly above average. For a film like Red One that’s about as good as anyone could hope for.”

Screen International’s Tim Grierson also gave Red One a “fresh” review with some caveats, writing, The mixture of laughs, sentiment and action should satisfy undemanding families, and the story’s world-building offers enough novelty to what can otherwise be a predictable package.”

Rated PG-13, Red One opens in theaters nationwide on November 15.

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Tom Hanks launched into a playful tirade on the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast in which he took listeners through the long and winding road that is a movie’s reception. At one point, the two-time Oscar winner humorously referred to movie critics as “cocksuckers” as it’s ultimately time that is the decider of a movie’s value and not the reviewers. Case in point: Hanks’ 1996 directorial effort “That Thing You Do!,” which was dismissed by critics upon release before time turned into a beloved cult classic.

“All of this stuff lives. Now what has happened is that time has become one of the metrics for how these things matter, right?” Hanks said about a movie’s reputation. “Back in the day it was just a fistfight. It was every movie you had coming out, are you going to make the playoffs or not? Guess what? No, kid, you ain’t going nowhere. Or, you got a shot.”

“It used to be you had these Rubicons that you crossed,” the actor explained. “First of all, do you love it or not? That’s the first thing. I read this [script] and I love it. The next Rubicon you cross is when the movie is completely done a year and a half later and you see it for the first time, and you might like it. It doesn’t matter if it works or not. You look at it and say, ‘Hey, I think we acquitted ourselves pretty good.’ That’s Rubicon No. 2.”

“Then the critics weigh in, that’s Rubicon No. 3, and that’s always up or down: ‘We hate it, we like it. This is the worst thing. … Oh hey, Tom, I saw you in a movie. It was cute.’ That’s when you ask the wife, ‘Hey, honey, could you take the revolver out of the glove box and hide it somewhere, because I think…”

After the critics comes the box office, and “then a ton of time goes by when none of that stuff matters anymore,” Hanks said. Time ultimately trumps whatever critics had to say about the film.

“The movie just exists exactly as it is outside of loser or winner status or thumbs up, thumbs down,” Hanks continued. “And that’s when this stuff comes around, where it’s like that this thing that didn’t work back then kind of does work now, or just the opposite, a thing that was huge back then is a museum piece and doesn’t really speak to anything.”

O’Brien then brought up “That Thing You Do!,” to which Hanks responded: “Let me tell you something about these cocksuckers who write about movies. Can I say that?”

Hanks remembered a critic who originally dissed “That Thing You Do!” by writing: “Tom Hanks has to stop hanging around with veterans of TV, because this is just like the shot on TV and it’s not much of anything.” As the decades passed and the film became a cult classic, the same critic weighed in and loved the movie. “They said, ‘All you need is 20 years between now and then, and it ends up speaking some words,’” the actor remembered.

“But that’s the thing we all signed up for,” Hanks concluded. “That’s the carnival, that’s the contest. I got faith in that. That’s okay.”

Hanks has been making the press rounds in support of his new movie “Here,” which reunites him with “Forrest Gump” director Robert Zemeckis and co-star Robin Wright. Listen to Hanks’ full interview on the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast here.

“Starring Jerry as Himself” can be filed under “truth is stranger than fiction.” But it’s part truth and part fiction, or at least part drama, so it’s a bit of a slippery movie, in terms of both classification and credibility. 

The main character is a businessman named Jerry (Jerry Hsu) who came to America from China decades ago and became one of those people that politicians of every stripe like to single out during speeches as examples of the promise of America fulfilled: successful businessman, successful family man with many children, pillar of his community. Then one day he gets a call telling him that his bank account is being used to launder money, and that he’s going to need to participate in a sting operation run by two cops working for the Chinese government, Officer Zhang (Haosong Yang) and Inspector Ou (Fang Du). 

You could call this movie a “subjective documentary” if all documentaries weren’t already subjective in some way. What it mostly “documents” is one family’s version of a bizarre thing that happened to them. It’s loosely based on a true story, and most of the participants play themselves in what feels rather like a low-budget indie movie version of one of those true crime stories that appear on American television all the time. (Most of the movie consists of re-enactments, and once it kicks into that mode, the camera adopts an ominous low angle most of the time, and the screen shape becomes CinemaScope dimension, the official visual shorthand for “this is cinematic” whether it actually is or isn’t.) 

There’s a tradition in various world cinemas of people playing a version of themselves in stories that were based on things that really happened (Iran in the 1990s was especially good at these sorts of projects), but this one isn’t exactly a work in that tradition. It feels more like an incredibly elaborate home movie but directed by somebody who’s not actually part of the onscreen family: New York-based filmmaker Law Chen, who was also born in China. 

I don’t think it entirely works because documentaries that mold themselves after existing fiction film genres don’t truly satisfy unless the story being told could organically fit into that mold. James Marsh’s “Man on Wire,” a film about Phillip Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers, is probably the most successful example, relying heavily on re-creations that were shot and edited like pieces of a long lost 1970s heist flick.

This one is a pretty widely praised movie, so I guess I’m an outlier in saying that the re-creations are more clever than insightful, and that about halfway through the (thankfully brief) 74-minute running time, the determination to make the story fit into a certain prefabricated mold started to grate on me, because you can figure out what’s actually going on pretty fast, and after that, I didn’t find the “everyday person gets drawn into a police action” movie to be as inherently engrossing as a hypothetical straight documentary interviewing the participants would have been. 

But just because the movie is overthinking things, in a way, doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a great deal of thought put into it. A densely packed and propulsively edited montage of home video from the family opens the movie and sets up the re-enactments, and as “Starring Jerry as Himself” unfolds, you do start to realize that the film opened that way for reasons other than the almost guaranteed nostalgia-bath of seeing low-resolution video footage of actual people existing in a long-gone era. This is as much a movie about memory, psychology, and trust as it is an account of an event that seems pretty strange at first glance, but becomes stranger, deeper and sadder once you get to the bottom of it all.