Mark Reviews Movies: VIOLENT NIGHT

Violent Night, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 1, 2022

The pun of the title probably should have been enough of a warning, but here's Violent Night, a movie with a mildly amusing premise that imagines coming up with such a gimmick is more than enough for a day's work. Something like this, which pits a cynical Santa Claus against a team of heavily armed goons in the middle of a hostage situation, should almost certainly be funnier, weirder, or more over-the-top than what director Tommy Wirkola offers up in this by-the-numbers action thriller. Beyond anything else, it shouldn't feel so ordinary.

David Harbour has the thankless task of playing a Santa who undergoes so many shifts in characterization that it's difficult to tell what the joke of the character is supposed to be. At first, Santa is a defeated, semi-immortal man, who has lived for more than a millennium, seen more Christmases than he can recall, and finds this generation of kids to be the shallowest, greediest, and most ungrateful brats to ever exist.

Sitting in an English pub and drinking himself into deeper regret, jolly old St. Nick is pretty much ready to hang up his red suit and hat after this Christmas. The movie's own cynical touch hits its apex when the bartender looks up in wonder at her customer, flying away into the night on a sled drawn by eight reindeer—only for Santa to lean over the side and vomit on her head. There's probably something to this initial setup, but Pat Casey and Josh Miller's screenplay has entirely different plot and a wholly different variation of Santa to get to instead.

There's definitely not much to the secondary part of that plot, which involves the constant bickering, back-biting, and attempted betrayals of a wealthy family on this particular Christmas Eve night. One possible heir apparent to the Lightstone fortune is Jason (Alex Hassell). He, his estranged wife Linda (Alexis Louder), and the couple's daughter Trudy (Leah Brady) are spending the holiday at the family's remote estate.

While his sister Alva (Edi Patterson) and her clan—a doltish actor of a husband (played by Cam Gigandet) and a spoiled teenage son (played by Alexander Elliot)—vie to be the favorites of matriarch Gertrude (Beverly D'Angelo), Jason is ready to leave all of that behind and start focusing on being a better husband and father. Soon enough, a team of armed thieves, led by a man who has given himself the codename "Scrooge" (John Leguizamo), arrive with plans to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the mansion's vault.

By the way, a still-drunk Santa just happens to be in the great house just as the robbers start killing the security staff. After defending himself against one of the henchmen, he's ready to leave, but the sight of the good-hearted Trudy in trouble forces him to stay and fight the family's captors.

The rest of the plotting, staging, and joking is a predictable, repetitive, and one-note affair. Santa encounters goon after goon, before encountering a team or two of them as the night progresses, and has to fight each of them or each collective of them with whatever tools or decorations might be at hand.

Sometimes, that weapon is as seemingly innocuous as a strand of tinsel, and other times, it's as bone-breaking as a sledgehammer in the shed. A few times, it's a combination of the two, such as when Santa lassos a couple of mercenaries with a string of lights and feeds it into an industrial snow blower.

The movie's imagination for carnage alternates between rudimentary and juvenile, and the way Wirkola shoots and stages these brawls—in dim lighting and with shaky cameras capturing clunky choreography—definitely falls into that former description. One somewhat inspired sequence has Trudy tricking a pair of goons with booby traps, if only because the brutality of the scene serves as a decades-belated response to the unrealistic slapstick of the movie that motivates her scheme.

While the performances are a mixed bag (D'Angelo knows she doesn't have to do much more than swear with conviction, while Leguizamo is visibly lost as the Christmas-hating villain and Hassell is hamming it up for the cheesier approach this movie doesn't take), Harbour does play each mode of this Santa well enough. It's a bit surprising how much significance he gives to Santa's regret, as well as how touching some of the scenes between him and Brady can be. As for why Violent Night bothers to include so much in its simplistic tale, it seems like a clear sign that the filmmakers don't trust their gimmick—rightly, because it is pretty silly, but mostly to the movie's detriment, because it doesn't embrace how ridiculous all of this could be.

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