Chris Evans is squandering his movie stardom with films like Red One

Remember Chris Evans’s sweater? For a few weeks in December 2019, the chunky knitwear worn by the actor in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out became a miniature sensation. Clothing shops the world over sold out of the item’s nearest lookalikes. Baby Yoda wore it in memes. The New Yorker wrote an inexplicable 1,900 words on it. But while the sweater captured our imaginations because it looked cozy and luxe and appealingly well-worn, it was also because of the man wearing it. A star had been born.

Or at least reborn. Evans had exited the Marvel Cinematic Universe just a few months earlier, and carried with him enough audience goodwill from his 10 movies as Captain America that he could choose to be anything he wanted to be. Movie star? Serious actor? Regular ol’ wealthy recluse? Flash-forward five years, though, and Evans seems to have chosen option D: an actor who stars in nothing but slop.

This week sees the release of Red One, a janky jingle-ball of a movie in which Evans and Dwayne Johnson rescue a kidnapped Santa Claus (JK Simmons, still oddly hench) from the clutches of an evil witch (Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka, lots of wig). The acting is bad, the plot is nonsensical and the tone veers horribly from deathly self-serious to madcap and back again.

It’s no real surprise that the film is a colossal miss. It’s a Christmas film hitting cinemas while the Halloween pumpkins on everyone’s streets are still mostly intact, and promotion by its stars has been minimal. Its only real advance buzz was a wildly gossipy story inThe Wrap earlier this year alleging that the production was so troubled that its budget had ballooned to more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

But even in a movie so unceasingly awful that it’s a miracle Ryan Reynolds doesn’t make a cameo, Evans is its biggest point of bafflement. Playing a petty criminal pulled into a world of ogres, elves and talking polar bears, Evans has absolutely nothing to do beyond gasp and cringe on the sidelines and express variations on “What the hell?” or “Huh?”. By this point we’re used to Johnson being a harbinger of the worst thing you’ll see in cinemas in any given year, but why on earth is Chris Evans intent on joining him?

Red One comes on the heels of Evans’s extended cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine (where he reprised his Fantastic Four role of Marvel’s Human Torch), his dead-on-arrival Apple TV+ action comedy Ghosted with Ana De Armas and the disastrous Pixar origin story Lightyear (where he voiced the human Buzz Lightyear upon whom the Toy Story toy is based).

There have also been two expensive Netflix films that I’m not convinced exist: The Gray Man, alongside Ryan Gosling, and the opioid drama Pain Hustlers with Emily Blunt. Throw in his cameos in the risible Ryan Reynolds vehicle Free Guy and Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up and you’ve got an impressively awful roster of some of the worst cinematic crime scenes of the decade so far.

Now you may be asking: why all these words for Chris Evans, a man who’s been around for nearly 25 years but who many still likely confuse for his red-haired British namesake? The thing is, Evans was at one point quite clearly one of our best major Hollywood stars: a man with charisma in spades and a healthy balance of commercial blockbusters and auteurist detours on his CV. He’s incredibly funny as a vapid high school jock in the 2001 spoof Not Another Teen Movie, and endearingly gruff and heroic in Bong Joon Ho’s dystopian thriller Snowpiercer. As a cocky, oft-topless Human Torch, he walked away with two otherwise abysmal Noughties Fantastic Four movies, and quickly balanced them out with far better projects from Danny Boyle (2007’s Sunshine) and Edgar Wright (2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs the World). The guy’s got range.

So why, then, has he become stuck in the sludge? Last year, Evans did suggest in an interview with GQ that he has no real compulsion to act, explaining that he loves it when he does it, but that it’s “not something that I couldn’t live without”. He added: “I could just make furniture for nobody and be happy … I don’t want to occupy too much space in an industry that I’ve already poured 20 years into.”

But that doesn’t really explain why he’s acting at all. An old Hollywood philosophy used to be that actors and filmmakers should do “one for them and one for you” – a splashy commercial endeavour for the money, followed by a project that’s more creatively satisfying if less financially lucrative. Evans’s output used to slot into this ethos perfectly, but lately it’s gone haywire – he seems to be making one for them, followed by another one for them, then a few more for them just in case.

Considering he told GQ that he’s financially set for life thanks to his Marvel work, money doesn’t seem like a valid explanation for any of this. Instead, it feels as if we’re watching a man act for the sake of acting, in seemingly anything that comes his way, quality control but a distant memory. And nothing at the movies is more dispiriting than seeing someone’s once flashy star power wither before your eyes.

There are, thankfully, signs of life on the horizon. Evans has just worked with Past Lives director Celine Song – on a romcom with another movie star in crisis, Madame Web’s Dakota Johnson – and wrapped production on a dark comedy by Ethan Coen. He’s also due to begin filming an experimental thriller called Sacrifice with Anya Taylor-Joy, John Malkovich and, um, Charli XCX. So while he’s not a total lost cause at this point, it’s undeniable that he’s currently on shaky ground – with one arm in movie heaven, the other being pulled into creative hell by the Dwayne Johnsons and Ryan Reynoldses of the world. It’s too late for them, of course, but Evans still has a fighting chance. All he needs to do is throw on a chunky knit and get his head back in the game.

‘Red One’ is in cinemas