John Woo is back! Silent Night is the legendary action director’s first Hollywood film since 2003’s Paycheck, and while it doesn’t quite hit the high watermarks of his early Hong Kong thrillers like The Killer, nor the insane trips of his ’90s American excursions like Face/Off, it offers some small reminders of why his name is still spoken in hallowed whispers by action fans.
There are, sadly, no fluttering doves here. (Pleasingly, though, the film does take place in the fictional town of Las Palomas, Spanish for ‘The Doves’.) But other gloriously garish Woo trademarks remain: his usual gorgeously choreographed gunplay, lots of candles, freeze frames, a dead child, and more slow-motion than Garth Marenghi could ever hope for. When it goes full Woo, it’s a bonkers, bloody treat.
The film’s tone is way more sombre than the reindeer-on-a-Christmas-jumper opening sequence might suggest.
There’s not much to the plot. Joel Kinnaman plays a grieving father, out for revenge after his child gets caught in gangland crossfire; that’s about the long and short of it all. Robert Archer Lynn’s script is oddly conservative and retrograde; newspaper headlines like “Gang violence claims another innocent victim” could have been parachuted in from the 1980s.
In fact, the whole film’s tone is way more sombre than the reindeer-on-a-Christmas-jumper opening sequence might suggest, Kinnaman portraying his revenge-obsessed character with a solemn intensity. There is, however, occasional room for tiny flashes of levity or lightness: Brian writing “KILL THEM ALL” on his calendar is a lovely touch; a shot of a single tear falling from a face, match-cut to a bullet casing, should be hung in the Louvre.
The unusual conceit to have a dialogue-free script feels unwise in places — the actors do their best at making faces at each other while standing around in silence, without it ever quite escaping Gimmick Valley. But it makes a crazy sort of sense in the action, which remains as balletically badass as Woo’s Hong Kong heyday, taking on a kind of ultraviolent Buster Keaton quality. Silent Night is something of a mixed bag, but when Woo is walloping bad guys with explosions and car crashes and gun-fu, it’s action nirvana.