Lucy Liu and J.K. Simmons also star in Jake Kasdan’s action fantasy about an elaborate plot to kidnap Santa Claus and hijack his reindeer for nefarious purposes.

Dwayne Johnson’s $250 million Yuletide action-fantasy-comedy, Red One, is not to be confused with his 2021 action-comedy crime caper, Red Notice. The new film is getting a wide theatrical release, for starters, while the earlier one went straight to Netflix, topped the most-streamed chart for a minute and then was never spoken of again — almost as if it never existed.

Fast & Furious franchise veteran Chris Morgan’s screenplay, from a story by fellow producer Hiram Garcia, plays like the result of a pitch meeting in which some over-eager junior on the studio development team said, “Hey, let’s do Elf, but with a kidnapping plot and shit tons of awesome technology!”

Evans plays Jack O’Malley, an unscrupulous opportunist introduced as a mouthy preteen boy (Wyatt Hunt) collecting cash from his cousins in exchange for what he claims is definitive proof that Santa Claus does not exist. Thirty years later, he’s lifting other people’s lattes from the café pickup counter before heading home to a bank of computer monitors from which he surfs the dark web, operating as the world’s greatest hacker/tracker for hire, under the alias “The Wolf.”

Johnson is Callum Drift, head of the North Pole security team Enforcement, Logistics and Fortification (E.L.F., geddit?) responsible for Santa’s protection. Simmons’ Nick, as Cal fondly addresses him, likes to do the department store rounds ahead of each year’s big delivery run. The movie sets him up like a U.S. president, with a Secret Service motorcade escorting him from the shopping mall to a hangar where his team of digitally rendered reindeer stand ready for takeoff, hitched to a golden sleigh styled like a futuristic chariot.

Once airborne, they switch to hyper-speed and zip back to the North Pole, a domed super-city furnished with advanced technological capabilities yet staffed with elves that look disturbingly like mutant Yodas in a child-labor factory. Santa greets Mrs. Claus (Bonnie Hunt) before diving into his gym routine, bench-pressing major poundage to get in optimum shape for the big night.

Meanwhile, Jack is being paid handsomely by an anonymous employer to hack the Intercontinental Seismic Surveillance System. He identifies a North Pole entry point that has remained concealed for centuries and, before long, a highly coordinated tactical unit has penetrated the dome and made off with Red One while Cal is chasing decoys.

This emergency prompts M.O.R.A., the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority (so many acronyms), to spring into action. The organization’s director, Zoe Harlow (Lucy Liu), tracks down the purportedly untraceable Wolf in what seems like seconds and Jack is strong-armed into teaming up with Cal to unmask the kidnappers and rescue Santa.

Coming on the heels of Liu’s terrific work in Steven Soderbergh’s haunted house chiller, Presence (opening Jan. 24), the thoroughly generic role assigned to her here is one of many dispiriting things about Red One. Even when Zoe gets to kick some ass in a fight scene, the action cuts away almost immediately to the armored-up dudes.