The heroes of Red One, a glittering lump of Christmas action-comedy coal coming to a theater near you, travel the world through secret portals hidden in the back of toy stores. To which any kid in the audience might ask, “Wait, are there any stores that only sell toys?” Well, not anymore, Timmy. Such brick-and-mortar establishments have been largely wiped out by Amazon, aka the mega-corporation that financed this film. To see the company build the lore of a so-called blockbuster around a business model it destroyed is about as offensive as, say, Netflix sitcom about Blockbuster.

Speaking of the streaming giant, Red One isn’t a sequel to Red Notice, though it does share a star and a general air of gross commercial indifference with that algorithmic sloppiness. There’s something distinctly Bezosian about his take on the most wonderful time of the year: Santa Claus, played by an unfathomably overqualified JK Simmons, is an up-and-coming mogul who hits the gym before climbing on the sleigh and runs his operation with an efficiency that could put a twinkle in the eye of any billionaire. Early on, the film lands at the North Pole, and the place has the dreamy enchantment of a fulfillment center. The elves, we are told, work 364 days a year and only take December 26th off. Like their counterparts at Amazon, they could use a better contract.

With a heart two sizes too small, this is a buddy comedy, unpacking and combining a number of stock action figures after Santa is kidnapped by the Nordic witch Grýla (Kiernan Shipka). To save Christmas, the big man’s 300-year-old head of security, Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson), must join forces with Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans), a sleazy, cynical hacker and a cowardly father. “Do I look human?” Drift rhetorically asks his mismatched partner at one point, and even ignoring his iconic cartoon physique, the answer is again “no”: The Rock, who has a stony, humorless glow by default, is all plastic here machismo. That leaves Evans to pick up the comedic slack, which he does with a touch more New Yawk attitude and pathos than is strictly necessary. Of course, going beyond this shoddy material isn’t a great lift. Mostly, his performance leaves a warm and fuzzy gratitude that Ryan Reynolds was unavailable.

Imagine an answer during the holidays Men in black with more acronyms than jokes. When nu-manji director Jake Kasdan introduces no new wrinkle to the mythological intelligence agency led by a poker-faced Lucy Liu; he bombards us with flashy attractions. The CGI stocking stuffers include a trio of evil snowmen, a Hot Wheels car magically scaled up to full-size Lamborghini proportions, and a talking polar bear with no personality. The effects have a garish inconsistency familiar to the age of blockbuster crunch. If you subject your eyes to it, you feel sympathy for the overworked, non-unionized performers who presumably sacrificed a vacation day or two to secure a release date that was probably written before the script.

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