Silent Night (John Woo, 2023)
John Woo’s Silent Night works best as an exercise in visual storytelling, but ultimately this revenge movie is just too one dimensional to become a Christmas classic.
It’s been twenty years since the Hong Kong legend made his last Hollywood-movie with the ill-fated sci-fi movie Paycheck, starring Ben Affleck.
Before that, of course, he made the classic action movie Face/Off (1997), with Nicolas Cage and John Travolta quite literally facing-off against each other.
In Silent Night Joel Kinnaman and Catalina Sandino Moreno play a couple, Godlock and Says, who lose their only son on Christmas Eve when they are caught in the crossfire of gang warfare in the city of Los Palamos. For the rest of the movie Godlock embarks on a journey of revenge, basically forcing Saya to abandon him. First the planning, then the training and then finally, again on Christmas Eve, vengeance!
The gimmick central to the movie, is that due to an earlier gunshot wound to the throat, sustained while trying to capture the killers immediately after his son’s death, Godlock is unable to speak.
That’s not to say Silent Night is a silent picture. There are a lot of sounds, from Marco Beltrami’s electronic score and some Christmas songs on the soundtrack, including some variations on the Silent Night-theme, via Kinnaman’s grunts, to various amounts of talk, coming from a television set, a police scanner, and a You Tube video explaining how to plant a knife in someone’s neck (good one!)
The screenplay by Robert Lynn Archer is pretty bare-bones, and Woo’s assured direction makes it even easier to follow, which is no mean feat by itself.
Kinnaman's face conveys all the emotions you could expect from a lost soul carrying a giant death wish, while Sandino Moreno is great as per usual, even though she is ultimately criminally underused (as in so many projects since her breakthrough in the brilliant Maria Full of Grace). The bad guys are just that, bad, apart from their leader, Playa (Harold Torres), who is bad to the bone.
The action and fight scenes are pretty good, but to be honest, after a while they do get a bit tiresome, because frankly because it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.
The grungy looking Silent Night will probably be enjoyed most by people who enjoy mindless, excessive violence, just for the hell of it. Which is absolutely fine, I’ve been known to enjoy mindless, excessive violence, just don’t expect it to be anything more than that.
Note: Silent Night is released worldwide in December.