‘Silent Night’ Movie Review: John Woo’s Showy Flair Elevates Dialogue-Free Revenge Actioner
Photo from Lionsgate
From Jeremy Kibler
Silent Night brings back veteran action director John Woo (Face/Off) to Hollywood without reinventing the wheel. Skillfully choreographed and delivering the ultra-violence as promised, this is base-level vigilante entertainment that pulls off a major gimmick: there isn’t a single line of dialogue throughout. After all, the late, great Roger Ebert used to say, “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.”
Like any revenge movie, it all starts with someone getting taken, sometimes permanently. After his 7-year-old son (Alex Briseño) gets shot in the crossfire of a gang car chase on Christmas Eve, family man Brian Godluck (Joel Kinnaman) chases after them, only to get shot in the neck. He gets hospitalized and then recovers but can no longer speak. As the months go on, Brian wallows from the loss of his child. Grief and depression lead him to drinking bottle after bottle and living in the garage, while his wife Saya (Catalina Sandino Moreno) grieves alone but still moves forward. It’s not until next Christmas Eve that Brian will be ready to kill the face-tatted gang leader, Playa (Harold Torres), and anyone doing his bidding. You know this, too, because on his calendar for December 24th, Brian writes “Kill Them All.”
As a tragedy with bloodlust in its heart, Silent Night is surprisingly more bleak than it is fun. The opening action set-piece is operatic, with some vehicular destruction, but more emotionally gutting than anything else. It doesn’t have the rah-rah glee of many post-Death Wish revenge thrillers, which is more than fine, but the somber tone does occasionally clash with the over-the-top violence. Admittedly, the grieving/dead child elements are mopey (and understandably so!) until they become heavy-handed and hokey, verging on parody. The final moments involving ornaments and a toy train set really test the viewer’s emotional manipulation.
Robert Archer Lynn’s script is efficient but pretty basic and simplistic to the point that it doesn’t stop long enough to ask any moral questions. For the most part, director Woo and his cast make the dialogue-free gimmick work when the film itself is so uncomplicated. It is refreshing these days to follow a regular schmo without any previous training (until Brian does train himself with the help of YouTube and a pull-up bar), and Kinnaman is as convincing in dad mode as he is as a glowering avenger. Besides Brian (who has actually lost his voice box), not speaking goes for everyone else, including his wife, the gang enforcement detective (Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi) on the case, and the gang members Brian ends up pursuing. There is still sound, like chatter on a radio and plenty of pain uttered from the bodies that get crushed, stabbed, and shot, but never an actual word from the people on-screen.
Silent Night (get the double meaning now?) is a Christmas movie but not as much as Die Hard. Outside of a Rudolph sweater, some Christmas decorations, and a gangbanger in a Santa robe, it barely utilizes its Christmas setting as more than window dressing. There isn’t a white dove in sight, as John Woo is wont to throw in (does a symbolic bird on a window sill count?), but he still shows off his action-movie flair here and there in the stunt choreography. A knock-down, drag-out fight after a silent interrogation from Brian’s garage into the kitchen is pretty brutal, and outside of an extended shootout and car chases, the only real standout action sequence is the climax in a warehouse stairwell. Woo also gets points for a beautiful match-cut when a tear falling from Brian’s wife’s face transitions into a falling bullet casing at a shooting range; that’s the stuff.
Without Woo’s showy filmmaking form, Silent Night would just be generic kill-them-all action fare. For a blood-soaked actioner that experiments with letting the violence do the talking, it isn’t half-bad. Rather than giving much of anything to think about afterwards, the film does make you realize one thing: every Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme movie from the ‘90s might have fared better if they didn’t have to speak.
Rating: 3/5
Silent Night hits theaters on December 1, 2023.
