Silent Night: John Woo Leaves a Lump of Coal in Our Christmas Stocking
By Thom Ernst
Rating C
I remember the Christmas when my late Aunt Helen, who traveled from Rochester, New York, to Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, and whose hors d'oeuvres were legendary, arrived with a simple cheese and cracker platter.
We all agreed the cheese platter looked delicious, but disappointment hung over the room like a crop of soggy mistletoe.
Not to sound ungrateful, but this year it's director John Woo, traveling from Hong Kong to North America, and whose action films—A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Face/Off—are legendary, who arrives with a cheese and cracker tray.
Joel Kinnaman becomes a killing machine, for reasons that have nothing to do with Christmas
Woo comes too late to the anti-holiday movie genre to add anything new to the party. But if he is out to out-Scrooge the multitude of similarly subversive films—Die Hard, Black Christmas, Bad Santa, Violent Night—he succeeds, but only in that Silent Night is the dreariest of the lot even by anti-holiday movie standards.
Silent Night is a revenge flick, the kind that has lazy scriptwriters, in this case, Robert Archer Lynn, justifying an innocent death to propel the central character toward heroism; It's cheap and even cheaper when played without irony.
The story is deathly morbid. The Christmas setting is practical only as an exclamation mark to emphasize the tragedy of a child struck down by stray bullets from a warring gang of street thugs. Setting the story at Christmas is unnecessary, but one of Woo's gifts is to embrace the unsubtle and play it like a well-conducted orchestra.
Woo has a taste for melodrama that is exceeded only by the works of Douglas Sirk, whose films are credited for inspiring daytime soap operas. But Silent Night has far too many shades of black for the melodrama to work in its favour. And the film's gimmick— a movie with no discernible dialogue—only heightens the characters' angst to a level of absurdity.
The boy's father, Godluck (Joel Kinnaman), confronts the gang and is nearly killed by its leader, Playa (Harold Torres). We know Playa's the leader from his menacing good looks and excessive face tattoos.
Godluck (a name that lingers between 'good luck' and 'Goldilocks' without any discernible purpose) is left without a larynx. Being unable to speak has somehow rendered the rest of the characters silent.
A silent action film is an exciting concept, but Silent Night isn't entirely silent. The movie is filled with grunts, groans, screams, cries, and barely audible tones of empathy and grief. And though there are some clever moments angled to make the gimmick work, the script might better serve the Writer's Guild of America as a P.S.A. demonstrating the need for good onscreen dialogue.
Woo uses the greater part of the film to play out Godluck's struggle to escape his self-pitying slump and morph into a hard-ass assassin. Woo gives the audience front-row seats to Godluck's transformation utilizing Rocky-style montages of Godluck doing chin-ups, watching instructional knife-fighting videos, and honing his trick-driving skills.
When the transformation is complete, Kinnaman, as Godluck, looks to the camera, distorting his face into a vengeful, angry, scowling version of Christopher Lloyd.
Kudos go to a supporting cast, mainly Catalina Sandino Moreno and Kid Cudi, who shine with little to do and even less to say.
Woo does book-end the film with knockout action sequences, one that sets a promise it doesn't fulfill and the other a tacked-on reminder of that promise. It may be enough to keep diehard Woo fans happy. Even so, Silent Night is not the second coming of Die Hard that we might have hoped.
Silent Night is directed by John Woo and stars Joel Kinnaman, Harold Torres, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Kid Cudi. Silent Night opens in theatres Friday, December 1.