Nearly universally panned, I thought Red One was an entertaining movie. It might offer a hearty serving of cheese now and again but not as much as most other secular Christmas movies.

To be clear, the film is a secularist fantasy, though it has Christian highlights. For example, Santa Claus is constantly referred to as “St. Nick” throughout the movie. Red One’s St. Nick was not portrayed as the warm and gentle grandfatherly type. Rather, he was remade as exactly the type that would punch out the heretical Arius — the original naughty-lister — at the Council of Nicaea. St. Nick is calm and laidback but serious and focused on his task to bring presents to all of the good kids in the world all within a single night.

I was also pleased with the quick drone shot of Brazil’s Christ the Redeemer statue, which served to remind the audience of the “reason for the season.”

Santa One managed to create a workable and engaging mélange of action, spy thriller and Santa mythology reworked for the modern era. The movie’s producers successfully combined a “bodyguard movie” and a Secret Service thriller and wrapped it up in a “Let’s save Christmas!” bow as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson sets about saving Santa from those who are permanently on the naughty list.

The movie pulls out all the stops with non-stop action dressed up in the Santa mythos memorized by every Christian child between 1 and 18.

But it doesn’t make amends for the Whitman’s Chocolate Sampler of vulgarisms which made the film completely unacceptable for anyone under 18. As it is, I’d be embarrassed if my 25-year-old son heard the language used in this movie.

Which brings me to my next point. Why would Hollywood — wanting to make a profit via a Christmas-themed movie that appeals to kids — want to destroy that prospect by pumping it full of foul language?

Is innocence a lost commodity in Hollywood? Why would they intentionally sabotage a movie allowing it to be judged as inappropriate for kids?

I’ve never had access to multiple millions of dollars though I suspect that a movie’s success or failure was dependent upon my choices, I would like to think that I would go the route of increasing profits and producing a good quality family-friendly film rather than risk it all as did these marketing geniuses.

So the movie is not for kids. But it does bring up an old question kids have about how St. Nicholas can visit all of the kids in the world on Christmas Eve. So let’s do the math.

How many children? There are an estimated 536 million Christian children worldwide. But 44 million are under the age of 1, so they’re too young to grasp the concept. And parents generally report that their kids have been good about 80% of the time. So this gives us 393 million Christian kids between the ages of 1 and 18 who are on the Nice List, or approximately 131 million houses in the world for Santa to visit.

How much time per house? Santa nominally has 24 hours on Christmas Eve, but due to Earth’s rotation, it’s actually more like 36 hours, which is 129,600 seconds in total. Dividing those 131 million houses by 129,600 seconds, we get roughly 1 millisecond per household. Quick as a wink!

How fast would he travel? To traverse the approximately 62 million miles between households on Christmas Eve, his reindeer would need to travel at “ludicrous speed” — 1.72 million miles per hour. This sounds fast but it’s roughly 388 times slower than the speed of light.

What about mass and energy? Assuming 5 pounds of gifts per child, we get 1.97 billion pounds to be pulled by Santa’s reindeer, or 982,720 tons. To carry such a mass at such a speed, Santa would need 63,500 kilotons of energy — equivalent to the energy released by 42,000 Hiroshima-style bombs, or enough to power a 1,000-megawatt power plant for about 73 million years.

What is the energy source? According to these calculations, each of Santa’s nine reindeer would require approximately 10 billion calories each. As for Santa, I’ll defer to Red One’s suggestion that Santa himself would need 35 million calories for his 36-hour Christmas Eve journey.

A glass of whole milk and three chocolate chip cookies might give 450 calories in total; the typical medium-sized carrot might have around 25 calories. This should serve as a reminder to all well-intentioned Christian children who want to stay off Santa’s naughty list next year. (And remember, in Italy and France, Babbo Natale or Père Noël gets wine.)