Nick Clement brings us his thoughts on the brand new John Woo movie and provides us with this very own Silent Night review.
On Christmas Eve, a man witnesses the death of his young son when the boy gets caught in crossfire between warring gangs. Recovering from a wound that cost him his voice, he soon embarks on a bloody and grueling quest to punish those responsible.
A man’s young son is killed by gangbangers, so he does what anyone else would do in an action movie – he sets off on a righteous path of primal revenge.
What makes this scenario even more thrilling is that the man is not a cop or a trained killer; he’s a regular guy and that comes with some limitations, as things don’t go according to plan with each bout of revenge.
This is a 100 minute, wall-to-wall action fever dream with zero lines of spoken dialogue uttered with director John Woo bringing the vintage, two-guns-blazing POWER back from the dead, while speaking the universal cinematic language of violence and bodily destruction.
It’s deeply silly and yet deeply serious all at once, in a way that only Woo could ever craft, while existing as the very definition of pure cinema, using all the tricks in the aesthetic book to evoke emotional and visceral responses from the viewer.
Not much speaks louder than Woo’s insanely bloody bullet ballets, and here, he’s got the perfect leading man in Joel Kinnaman, a striking Danish actor who is still looking for his signature role in America, and with this brute force ass-kicker, he’ll clearly attain further cult following, as it seems theatrical audiences weren’t interested in seeing Woo’s return to American action cinema after a 20 year hiatus.
If you’re a fan of the master’s vintage actioners, like Face/Off and Hard-Boiled and Hard Target and The Killer, this grab-bag of ass-kicking takes absolutely zero prisoners, and blasts its way from one ludicrously entertaining set piece to the next.
Robert Archer Lynn’s high-dive of a screenplay doesn’t really make any sense, but that’s totally fine, because it’s got an immense set of balls, and the idea of telling this story with zero verbal communication from the actors is as inspired as this sub-genre of actioner can likely get.
Silent Night review by Nick Clement
Our Rating
Summary
This does exactly what it says on the tin – nothing more – nothing less.
