Red One is what you get when you blend a Christmas story with a modern Marvel mindset.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but the result is a little uneven. We have Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons), but he's something of a workout freak who keeps in top shape. And he has a high-tech global security to keep him safe, headed by Zoe (Lucy Liu) and with Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson) as his personal sidekick and bodyguard.

But then freelance tracker Jack O'Malley (Chris Evans) is hired to find an unknown target, and that leads his anonymous employer to Santa's hidden facility at the North Pole. Before you can sing a verse of "Jingle Bells," Santa has been kidnapped -- right before Christmas Eve.

Callum -- who was just one day away from retiring because of his disillusionment over the teetering ratio between naughty and nice people in the world -- is desperate to find his boss before Christmas is ruined. He grudgingly hires Jack to track down the person who first hired him and find the missing Claus.

The movie has a lot more chase and fight scenes than you usually see in a Christmas movie, including a tense moment where Callum trades apocalyptic slaps with Santa's estranged brother Krampus (Kristofer Hivju). But it eventually leads Callum -- along with his reluctant partner Jack -- to the lair of the troll witch Gryla (Kiernan Shipka), who wants to use Santa's list to punish the naughty children of the world instead of rewarding the nice ones ... and she needs Santa's latent powers to achieve her aim.

The movie definitely borrows a bit from the Marvel universe. Besides casting Captain America and J. Jonah Jameson as stars, it gives Ant-Man powers to Callum and conceals the North Pole under a Wakanda-like invisible dome.

An extra Christmas message comes in the form of Dylan (Wesley Kimmel), Jack's son, with whom he has a very limited relationship and who gets caught up in the mayhem. Of course you know the experience will change them, and their relationship, forever.

It's a fun movie, and it manages to convey some genuine Christmas spirit among all of the fights and CGI effects. But it's not great -- the action lags in several parts, and the plot isn't built to sustain the downtime very well. My wife and kids, who can easily sit through much slower-paced movies, got fidgety during this one, and I think it's because of the inconsistent tone. (There was also a bit more swearing than I anticipated in a Christmas movie, despite the PG-13 rating. Who was the target audience, anyway?)

Red One isn't going to become a modern Christmas classic -- it pales beside The Christmas Chronicles and Klaus, for example -- but it's an entertaining way to pass a cold winter's night with the family.