Can you believe it’s been twenty years since Hong Kong action maestro John Woo last presided over frenzied gunplay on American soil? After his much touted shift to the States eventually clicked on an empty chamber with the insipid Ben Affleck vehicle, Paycheck, Woo eventually headed back to his homeland for a much needed change of priorities. However, in a move that action fanatics would consider a christmas gift for the ages, the man who gave us Hard Boiled, The Killer and Face/Off has returned with Silent Night, a festive-set revenge movie that curiously features a story that contains virtually no dialogue whatsoever. If anyone could make this gimmick work, it would be Woo, but is his return to Western action cinema the gift we’ve all been waiting for, or is it the cinematic equivalent of just receiving a pair of boring old socks… just with far more gunplay.
Brian Godlock was an average electrician who living the family life in Las Palomas, Texas when his world was cruelly torn apart when his young son Taylor took a stray bullet on Christmas Eve back in 2021. The men responsible were engaged in a brutal gang war that saw them firing wielding from speeding cars as they duelled to the death like a couple of extras from Mad Max, but after an enraged Brian gave chase and even managed to kill a couple of the gang members, he managed to take a bullet to the throat for his troubled courtesy of tattooed kingpin, Playa.
Despite surviving his wounds, Brian finds that taking a shot to the throat generally leaves you as talkative as a coffee table and his enforced muteness only heightens his grief and disconnection from his wife Saya. However, after around a year of recuperation and alcoholism, Brian finally manages to find some purpose in his miserable existence when he finally decides that enough is enough and gives himself a deadline of Christmas Eve 2022 in order to retrain himself to become a death-dealing vigilante.
After an extended period of time where Brian gets jacked beyond belief, teaches himself to become more proficient with firearms than the Terminator and learns how to fight from YouTube videos, he patiently starts spying on his victims-to-be as his pieces their crime network together.
Soon, Christmas Eve hits and it’s go-time and thus a fateful suicide mission is set in motion as Brian attempts to kill as many members of Playa’s empire as he humanly can in a single night with only the limits of his physical endurance and a shit-load of return fire standing between him and his hunger for vengeance.
Regardless of how Silent Night was destined to turn out, it really is the perfect time for Woo to return to American filmmaking as the kinetic and frenetic John Wick saga has pretty much returned action cinema to far more mythic ground. Also, the days of furiously edited set pieces have also taken a welcome repast, with brawls and gun fights employing longer shots and more focused geography, which also harkened back to the days when Woo was at the height of his powers. However, whether you actually class Silent Night as being any good or not, may actually come down to a matter of perspective. For a film directed by the man that gave us Hard Boiled, Silent Night is actually fairly ordinary with no real surprises in store; and yet when you ponder that it’s also from the same mind that gave us the stunningly awful Ben Affleck sci-fi thriller, Paycheck, it has to be considered something of a minor triumph. Those who always fan-casted Woo as the perfect candidate to helm a Punisher movie will no doubt be stoked as the movie has way more in common with Thomas Jane’s stint wearing the skull than, say, The Killer or A Better Tomorrow 2. In fact, the sight of a suitably haggard Joel Kinnaman pulling on an expansive leather coat or brooding over his son’s grave invokes images of both Jane’s and Ray Stevenson’s tenure as Frank Castle as our voiceless hero vows to take the law into his own hands.
Ah yes, the voiceless thing. Silent Night’s big wrinkle is, of course, that its main character has had his voice box obliterated by small arms fire and thus spends the entire tun time in a permanent state on non-verbal anger and taken entirely from Kinnaman’s point of view, it proves to be a fairly neat gimmick. However, while the tight-lipped nature goes a fair way to making the point that we all are rendered voiceless when a senseless tragedy strikes, it doesn’t really explain why no one else talks either and as a result, those who are unable to just go with it may be a bit befuddled by it all.
However, it may be a cool-sounding stylistic choice, but it’s not exactly great when it comes to fleshing out characters who aren’t Kinnaman’s glowering lead. Catalina Sandino Moreno’s token wife mourns a lot while Woo’s typically nimble lens tracks the tears rolling down the contours of her face while Harold Torres’ near blank slate of a villain feature more character on the ink on his face than he’s allowed to show in his performance. There’s even a hint of some classic Wooisms in the form of Kid Cudi’s torn detective, who wrestles with the ethics of aiding a vigilante, but once again, the lack of dialogue restricts how deep thread can possibly go.
However, the main thing that will bring people to the dance is undoubtedly Woo flair for impressively emotional action, but those hoping for a final act apocalypse along the lines of A Better Tomorrow 2 may walk away a little disappointed. While there’s plenty of glimmers that the old magic is still there on the form of a riveting opening sequence, a crunching car chase later on and the hint of some duel-handed gunplay, there’s no room for flapping doves or flamboyant dives in this grimy and dark thriller. However, the gore is plentiful (Brian’s throat wound is juicy as hell) and brain matter hits the ceiling with a satisfying splat, but even then it noticably feels like Woo is mostly coasting in 2nd gear rather than fully opening up the throttle.
Worse yet, the movie unkind of makes things a tad awkward by being one of those movies where a white guy runs around killing people of only a single ethnicity and while it isn’t as uncomfortably obvious as, say, Rambo: Last Blood, you’d think Woo would be above solely targeting Mexicans for exploitation thrills.
Still, Woo-lite it far better than no Woo at all and even though fans may want to follow the movie up with a quick re-watch of the final twenty minutes of Hard Target, just to take the edge off, this mid-level shooter manages to just about make itself heard despite there barely being a peep spoken.
Silent, but deadly.
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