Silent Night - Review Thread

I can’t say I had terribly high expectations for Silent Night, a movie I kind of went to see on a whim, and I’d say that the movie itself mostly lived down to those expectations. The film mark’s legendary action director John Woo’s return to American cinema after spending the last fifteen or so years making commercial Chinese films that have gone mostly undiscussed abroad. That should be pretty exciting but the reception to the film has been rather muted. The film is essentially a revenge movie in which a man’s child is killed in the crossfire of a gangland shooting and then proceeds to train himself in combat in order to find and kill these men. That premise is very bare bones and to make this at all noteworthy the film has incorporated a gimmick in which the movie does not use any spoken dialogue, a trick that was already used to much better effect earlier this year in the film No One Will Save You but here this just seems forced and unhelpful. Beyond that the film just has a number of basic execution problems. Joel Kinnaman does not prove to be a particularly engaging star here and we don’t get a whole lot out of this character beyond his grief and vengeance, and the film’s tacit endorsement of vigilante violence is highly questionable. But of course this is a John Woo movie we’re talking about, ultimately it’s supposed to be the action sequences that his movies live or die by and here they are… okay. The guy hasn’t completely lost his abilities behind the camera in filming shootouts and the like but I do think the apprentices have surpassed the master at this point and I’m not sure he can quite compete with the Chad Stahelskis and Gareth Evans of the world anymore. It’s not a completely terrible movie, the last shootout scene is alright and its gimmick is probably enough to keep it from being completely forgettable but it’s definitely not essential.