SILENT NIGHT (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Silent Night, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 30, 2023

If there's anything deeper to Silent Night, it's in a study of one man's drive for revenge at the sacrifice of everything else in his life. Some might see that as a tragedy, but director John Woo's movie sees it as an inevitability. The feeling of that is less about human nature or the many failings of society, though. It's simply because this is an action movie, and eventually, there has to be a lot of brutal, bloody killing for that to be true.

Woo, of course, is—or, at one point, was—one of the more dependable and polished orchestrators of action in the movies, developing a style so particular that it more or less became a cliché. There's a moment here, for example, when a character wields two pistols, aims them in different directions at multiple foes, and, finally, unleashes a hail of bullets straight on at a charging group of gangsters. Seeing that imagery, it's tough to tell if one should be thinking that this is a classic Woo setup or that this character must have watched a lot of Woo movies in his time. That's just how recognizable and defining the filmmaker's sense of style has become.

There are flashes of that in this new movie, the director's first Hollywood outing in 20 years. It's a reminder that he's one of the few directors capable of managing controlled chaos and carnage, while making it look both easy and, well, cool.

A fake one-take on a long, tall, and winding stairwell, for example, might be the highlight here, even if it is nothing more than our hero taking on one or two enemies at a time with a shotgun, pistols, and a knife. We can even see where Woo has snuck in a cut or several of them, as the framing sneaks in a bit too close to the protagonist's leather coat or a bad guy does a falling flip directly at the camera. Does it matter that the technical seams of the sequence are apparent when the choreography of it is so clever, the momentum of it is kinetic, and the skilled planning of the various parts are so undeniable?

What's frustrating and ultimately disappointing about the rest of the movie, which spends a lot of time building to a lengthy final showdown across an expanse of urban decay, is how hollow the excuse for that long stretch of action turns out to be. A big part of that is our hero, an ordinary man named Brian (Joel Kinnaman), whose young son is killed by a stray bullet during a car chase/shootout between members of local rival gangs.

The gimmick here, as the title suggests, is that our man is voiceless. Initially, that's because he's overwhelmed by furious grief, but later, it's on account of the main villain, a gang leader called Playa (Harold Torres), shooting him in the throat, after Brian tries to stop the men who killed his son.

Much of screenwriter Robert Archer Lynn's story, then, amounts to dialogue-free scenes of Brian's life collapsing in the aftermath of his son's violent death—retreating to drink in the garage, ignoring his wife (played by Catalina Sandino Moreno), remembering good times with his son and the boy's death—and deciding to seek revenge. The second act seems tailor-made for those who complain about so-called plot holes, as Brian exercises, learns close-quarters combat, practices firing a pistol, and teaches himself high-performance driving.

All of it will be necessary when the extended 30-minute-or-so climax arrives (as well as some daring motorcycle riding, which must have been oversight during the multiple training montages), and it's a bit confounding why the filmmakers believed so much attention to Brian's preparation would be more engaging than practically anything else about the man, his life, his grief, and his inability to find comfort, peace, or closure. There is little that's human about this story, in other words, apart from some melancholy looks from the wife, saccharine flashbacks of happier times with the son, and the three expressions to which Kinnaman's performance is limited.

The gimmicky absence of dialogue, leading to many awkward moments of silence when any normal human being would surely say something, is partly to blame. It's mostly, though, is so determined to keep its focus, its tone, and its purpose extremely narrow. This man wants revenge, and he will do everything—over and over again—in order to achieve it. That point is made incredibly early, so the specific details of how he readies himself for that goal are just acts of delaying the story's inevitable third act.

To be sure, Woo still possesses some of that old flair for the action when it does finally arrive, meaning Silent Night ends with a bang—a long string of bangs, actually. We get car chases, shootouts in vehicles and on foot, and some drag-out fights, and they're successful but also repetitive, because they come all at once, and slight, because everything before them feels like an excuse for their existence.

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