Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: John Woo
Starring: Joel Kinnaman, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Scott Mescudi, Harold Torres
Is there a more primal and basic sub-genre than the revenge thriller?
Something bad happens to the protagonist, usually the murder of a loved
one or sometimes even a pet (or a rape if they're a woman), and said
protagonist seeks violent revenge against those who wronged them. With
his Christmas-set revenge thriller Silent Night, John Woo strips the set-up down to its bare bones with a movie
that is practically dialogue free.
When his seven-year-old son fatally catches a stray bullet from a
drive-by shooting on Christmas Eve, Brian (Joel Kinnaman) chases
after the Mexican mobsters involved and ends up being shot in the
throat. He survives, but loses his voice. Refusing an artificial
voicebox, Brian retreats into himself, ignoring his grieving wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and hitting the bottle. After a while he decides to get revenge on
the gangsters responsible for his loss. He purchases a second hand
sports car and uses his engineering skills to turn it into something
resembling the Batmobile. He physically trains himself relentlessly,
eventually revealing an action hero torso that's as far from a dad bod
as imaginable. He spends hours at the gun range. On a calendar he writes
the words "Kill them all" on December 24th. His wife leaves him. He
scopes out the gangsters' hideaway. Then Christmas Eve comes around, and
he unleashes hell.
It sounds like a formula for success, and a premise like this should be
catnip for a veteran action filmmaker like Woo. But
Silent Night is remarkably dull. After an adrenalised
opening sequence it takes close to an hour for the action to resurface,
leaving us to watch Brian put himself through the sort of preparations
we've seen hundreds of vengeful protagonists go through in past movies.
Just to make sure we don’t forget Brian's motivations we're treated to
endless flashbacks of Brian and his family in vignettes that wouldn't be
out of place in a conservative politician's campaign commercial.
When the action does kick in it's weightless and lacks the grit
necessary for this grimiest of sub-genres. Despite having decided to
become Batman mere months before, Brian is unfeasibly adept at taking
out scores of Mexican cartel members. An African-American cop (Scott Mescudi) is shoehorned in as an ally to Brian, presumably so it doesn't come
off as too much of a white supremacist fantasy.
Woo's first American movie in two decades looks like it was shot in
2003 and left on the shelf. It has that horrible, sickly green and
orange colour scheme that was so popular in the early noughties, as seen
in the Saw movies and JJ Abrams' Mission Impossible III. The soundtrack is filled with industrial dance music, which seems
unlikely to be on the Spotify playlist of Mexican gangsters. As with
Woo's previous American movies, Silent Night proves that
only Asians look cool firing two guns in slow motion; everyone else just
looks silly.
What's most disappointing about Silent Night is that its
silent conceit is no more than a gimmick that often takes us out of the
movie. Brian's wounds render him mute but he's not deaf, so it makes no
sense that no other characters utter a word around him. It's
particularly implausible in the scenes shared with his wife that she
never once opens her mouth to express herself. When villains are shot,
stabbed and punched they react in silence rather than screaming
expletives. I'm a hardcore supporter of the "show, don't tell" principle
when it comes to filmmaking, but Silent Night is so
stubborn in sticking to its gimmick that it makes a mockery of visual
storytelling. If you want to see this idea pulled off with aplomb, check
out Coralie Fargeat's excellent
Revenge.
