Silent Night (2023)

Director John Woo’s first picture in six years—and he’s back in Hollywood!—is all cinematic stunt: no dialogue, just fast cars, fistfights, high-powered guns, dangerous knives, a single dove, and the Christmas season. Christmas Eve, to be specific, December 24, as written on the calendar of our grieving father guy, Brian Godlock (Joel Kinnaman): “kill them all.” Silent Night, speaking figuratively to Die Hard, says, “Hold my beer.” You see, there was a gang war that erupted, with some crazy wild shooting and driving—not kidding, this hanging out weaving moving vehicles firing automatic weapons, all Benny Hill and Keystone Kops but deadly serious, is impressive footage. Then a stray bullet kills a 7-year-old boy. This is also around Christmas, you see, and the father subsequently spends the next year toning up like Travis Bickle for a big finale like Taxi Driver. This is why we can’t have nice things. To be sure, I missed dialogue and noticed its absence in Silent Night, all the pleasant clarifying padding of exposition. In all the places where it would naturally occur, Woo the filmmaker draws away from it or cuts away from it. We know the routines of high-action revenge, but usually they include some exposition. I wouldn’t say Silent Night is an experiment that entirely works, but I wouldn’t say it fails either. These firefights and the hand-to-hand combat are intensely ludicrous as only classic Hong Kong action sensibilities can deliver. It’s very rock-‘em sock-‘em from one of the masters of rock-‘em sock’-em and it’s a very pure form of rock-‘em sock-’em too, for that matter. Revenge stories always deliver queasy satisfactions, so that’s here as well. Not really my cup of coffee, but I’m easily enough drawn into them and then easily enough manipulated and satisfied. Making the whole thing about a 7-year-old son is an upright way to do it, on one level, granted that involving children this way is always shamelessly pumping up the volume on stakes. It’s also something of a crass way to do it—nooo, not the children!! At least Woo wisely refrains from sexualizing the terrible crime and keeps the focus always on the action, which veers toward the outrageously improbable, but hey, stunt players deserve their time in the sun too. Silent Night is not as suspenseful as Die Hard, and it’s also not as subtly Christmassy. But the action is 1,000% better. If you like a Christmas movie that looks like Die Hard, make it John Woo’s Silent Night.