A tormented father witnesses his young son die when caught in a gang's crossfire on Christmas Eve. While recovering from a wound that costs him his voice, he makes vengeance his life's mission and...
🎶Silent Night, dangerous night, Killers get wrecked at first sight🎶 In all seriousness, John Woo’s return to American filmmaking in “Silent Night” makes for an experience as perplexing as it is aggravating, one in which the gimmick of the film gets too much care and cripples everything else to the point of suffocation.
It’s like a live-action iteration of “The Quiet Man” game come to life.
In all seriousness, it doesn’t take a seriously sophisticated screenwriter to pick apart how this plot is going to go; if you’ve seen any other revenge-thriller action flick in the past 10 years, no prizes in guessing how its all going to turn out. That being said, both the presentation and execution of it all widely picked apart at my ability to find any worthwhile content in this.
Lack of consistency with its no-dialogue gimmick is the first red flag. On one hand, the movie is obviously style over substance and that style keeps the film trucking along at a watchable pace. And there are a few novel ways in which the film avoids dialogue that makes some scenes better for it (it works mostly in the beginning) but once you’re past the introduction, it rarely works again, worsened by the reality that in the first few minutes, you can audibly here Brian’s wife speak to him and mouth “It’s ok” as he mourns. There’s no real rhythm behind barely hearing actual words or the long on-going stretches of silence that happen and the longer the film progresses, the quicker the sheen wears off and the more predictable and stupider the story becomes.
Whatever emotional throughline this films wants us to believe it has, it never once falls into place. Brian is the closest thing this film has to an actual character between losing his kid and going through adversity to build himself up and go after the perpetrators; every other character here is a blatant caricature between the baddies being Black and brown, women being helpless or cops being useless. The weird absence of any meaningful relationships being developed beyond the bare minimum only adds to the frustration that not only is there little to no nuance to its stance on revenge, further compounded by the retrograde depictions of race and gender the film bash you over the head with again and again but it makes the setup come off both woefully dated and empty all at once.
I would bet good money that this was originally presented as just a bog-standard Christmas revenge shoot-em-up flick and they tacked on the no-dialogue gimmick after the fact to give the film a hook to draw people in. But nothing feels crafted to suit the theme, no meaningful tension comes out of it and mixing that with this determinedly morose tone WITHOUT an emotional backbone is a death sentence for any revenge flick.
Visual-forward approaches for John Woo are a part of his blunt but effective highly stylized directing style and you can definitely say there’s plenty here. That being said, it barely masks the hefty dosage of video game logic we can forgive under his veteran insight.
For every half-decent edit and transition, the rest are clunky in places and that results in a saggy pace, it’s incidental production design feels just as unappealing and disposable as the cast, costumes are fine if not uninspired and the visual aesthetic can’t keep itself consistent at looking either optically pleasing or incredibly murky-looking and ugly. The cinematography itself is barely kinetic enough to sustain it and the lighting is drop-dead gorgeous but all that agility doesn’t liven up any of the technical elements to make it look even twice as appealing. You can’t even have Marco Beltrami save the proceedings with decent but forgettable scoring. The music in general is vastly disappointing.
Joel Kinnaman is solid enough at selling both emotional and physical turmoil as well as supplying the emotional clarity needed for a role like this but his screen presence doesn’t hold the same way some like Nic Cage or Sylvester Stallone does. All of the supporting cast do an admirable job of telling their part of the story also but they too feel one-note and disposable.
Woo’s comfort zone lies mostly in the ludicrously gratuitous action sequences, yet even those are scrappily choreographed and after slugging through nearly an hour to get to just bog-standard shootouts, I don’t know.
This is a movie that even when it can be bothered to try, it isn’t all that considerate or sincere about its own implications because again, it’s all about the gimmick. Everything else that follows is extremely derivative.
