John Woo returns to Hollywood after 20 years away to bring us Silent Night starring Joel Kinnaman as a grieving father who goes on a revenge mission on Christmas Eve after suffering a traumatic loss the year before. Oh and there’s no real dialogue in the movie. I don’t mean that there is limited dialogue, I mean there are maybe two words said by the characters in the whole movie. It’s an interesting choice for sure, and I’ll touch on later in the review.
I don’t consider myself a huge John Woo fan by any means. I haven’t seen any of the movies he’s made since 2003 in China and of his filmography I’m most familiar with Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2. I love Face/Off but I’m not a huge fan of M:I2, but the style and the action scenes in both are fun enough that I was excited to see Woo return with this one and see what he could bring to it.
So was Silent Night a new Christmas classic or the movie equivalent of a lump of coal?
My Thoughts
Unfortunately, Silent Night didn’t hit for me. I was most let down by just how underwhelming the whole thing was. Nothing in the movie really stood out as unique or even particularly interesting. The title and the marketing imply a fun (in a graphic action movie sense) little Christmas romp along the lines of 2022’s Violent Night but it doesn’t deliver on that premise at all.
The only thing particularly unique about it was the lack of dialogue in it but even that doesn’t really work. It doesn’t add anything interesting to the movie and at certain times feels incredibly forced. Even in the world of the movie, the main character’s silence is so inconsequential that I am left wondering what the point even was.
Another issue was the pacing. This movie is only about an hour and forty minutes long but you feel the length of the movie in the early parts of it. I saw this with my brother Ty and my friend Steven and at one point Steven nudged me and said “Alright here we go!” and another twenty minutes went by before we got to the next action scene.
It’s not really a spoiler because it’s shown in the trailer and the movie opens with this part, but if you want to know absolutely nothing about the movie, skip this paragraph. The inciting incident is that Joel Kinnaman’s son is killed with a stray bullet from a gang related shooting. The movie begins just after this happens, but we spent at least thirty to forty minutes watching Kinnaman grieve and flashback to various memories and the incident itself. The issue for me is that none of the added context and all this time does nothing to add to our feelings about the movie. To contrast that, in the movie John Wick we don’t need to see John experience grief after his dog is killed. We already have as much sympathy for the characters in both cases that we can. We don’t need to see Kinnaman struggle with the loss of his child to feel bad for him, so the fact that we spend all this time while he grieves and trains as he builds up to his revenge serves no purpose but to really fill out some time.
So it’s a slow start sure, but are the action sequences worth all the wait? Well ugh, not really. This is perhaps the most disappointing part of the movie for me. John Woo is known for his action movies and as much as I didn’t like the story in Mission: Impossible 2, the action scenes are so crazy and over the top that you can’t help but have fun with it. I mean in M:I2 we get motorcycle jousting, diving and shooting with two handguns at the same time in slow motion, front flips to kick a guy already on the ground in the stomach, and not a single scene in this movie stands out to me as particularly interesting or memorable. It’s not that the action is bad, it just isn’t really good either.
Verdict
Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough here for me to recommend this one. This came really close to getting the rare “half-hearted” verdict from me, but through the writing of this review I realised that I really didn’t like it enough to recommend it.
With movies and TV feeling so similar today, I feel more inclined to recommend movies that take chances and try to do something different or unique, even if they don’t succeed. Unfortunately, I find this movie so bland and safe that I feel confident in saying that it’s not worth your time and I can’t believe I’m saying that about a John Woo movie.
Adriana Wiszniewska