Silent Night
LIONSGATE
It was bound to happen sooner or later: John Woo, the man who was inspired by the French New Wave and American gangster films to revolutionize Hong Kong action cinema, has come back to Hollywood after a 20-year exile with a movie that is marketed like a John Wick rip-off (with some of the same producers to boot). Ironic, considering that the series likely would not exist if director Chad Stahelski did not revere the Hong Kong legend. Woo had very little critical success in the States during the ‘90s and early 2000s, with the failure of Payback forcing him to return to East Asia.
Silent Night, his first film in 6 years since the underrated Manhunt, has also been met with general disdain from professionals and the public alike. It is a shame, for as flawed as the film’s screenplay is, it is a breath of fresh air among action-heavy theatrical releases: the bane of Marvel’s humor, constantly undercutting sincerity and melodrama with bathos, has poisoned the idea of watching a straightforward thriller with little to no levity whatsoever. Audiences chuckled at the image of a grieving father crying over the bloodied corpse of his son, just as they chuckled as said father gets shot point-blank in the throat by the same thug who killed his child with a stray bullet.
John Woo is on a different playing field than his contemporaries, something that should be seen as a strength rather than a weakness. He has always been an inherently emotional director, and Silent Night is all emotions: the lack of dialogue and talking frees him to tell the story through visuals alone, with warm flashbacks bleeding into the colder present, grief’s shadow covering Joel Kinnaman’s character into bloodthirsty darkness. The first part of his tale of revenge purposefully plays like the antithesis to John Wick’s: he is a man with no skills or strengths, so he spends an entire year training by himself, sharpening his aim at a gun range, doing non-stop push-ups in his dingy garage, and learning how to use a knife via online tutorials. It only makes sense that he gets wrecked by the first criminal that he tries to interrogate, showing how brutal, dirty, and nasty real violence really is.
This stripped-down approach to violence packs a tremendous punch: gunshots are deafening, knives are lethal, and bullets turn bodies into a bloodied pulp. Right from its compelling opening scene, Silent Night is closer in violence to Woo’s Bullet in the Head or The Killer than Mission: Impossible II or even Broken Arrow. It is unfortunate then that the borderline anti-violence theme of its first half quickly gives way to yet another male power fantasy in which Kinnaman singlehandedly slaughters a few dozen faceless, nameless, non-Caucasian gang members. To call the film “racist” is excessive, but its portrayal of crime syndicates and gang violence is deeply regressive and unfortunately nothing more than a poor excuse for an easy-to-grasp villain to see killed gruesomely on screen.
The final 30 minutes are non-stop action, with impressive car chases and shootouts that make the most of the limited budget with an abundance of practical effects and stunts that are rarely this good on such a small scale. Too bad that the script also becomes sloppy in this section, with characters choosing to move out of cover while being shot, or not aiming at their shooter while they reload out in the open. Kid Cudi also suddenly becomes relevant in the final minutes as he teams up with Kinnaman for an underwhelming “brothers in arms”, heroic bloodshed climax that is easily the weakest action scene in terms of staging. It does all end in a surprisingly emotional and heartbreaking final scene that may shed a couple of tears, but it is hard to shake the bitter aftertaste of a lackluster confrontation when everything that came before was very well executed.
Silent Night is an effective action venture from John Woo that uses its Christmas setting and dialogue-free gimmick to great effect, even if it suffers from a case of mistaken identity with what it ultimately wants to say about the endless cycle of violence and grief. Well worth a watch for John Woo fans and those looking for light entertainment on the big screen: a better, deeper take on the same story is the underrated James Wan thriller Death Sentence, which may lack the action choreography of Woo yet delivers a far more intricate, complex, and morally grey narrative.