Silent Night
Directed by John Woo
Written by Robert Archer Lynn
Starring Joel Kinnaman, Scott Mescudi and Catalina Sandino Moreno
Classification 14A; 104 minutes
Opens in theatres Dec. 1
So this is what it feels like when doves cry. For his big return to American filmmaking after two decades of semi-self-imposed exile, legendary Hong Kong director John Woo – master of operatic action, often backgrounding his gunfights with his signature flock of snow-white birds – delivers what might be the most disappointing comeback imaginable with the holiday-set thriller Silent Night.
Boasting a conceit that should not, and in fact does not, work – the film is bereft of dialogue, with characters expressing themselves instead through moans and yelps – Silent Night is all needlessly protracted foreplay, a true “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?” tease of an action movie. And when Woo finally does light things up with only 15 minutes to go, the result is a limp pop of sparks, easily extinguishable.
Set in a fictional Texas city that feels two days away from becoming a Mad Max-worthy wasteland, Silent Night opens with the exact kind of parental tragedy that led Woo’s Hollywood masterpiece, Face/Off: our hero, an everyday father named Brian (Joel Kinnaman) watches helplessly as gangbangers shoot his son dead during a neighbourhood drive-by. After chasing the thugs down the street, Brian himself catches a bullet to the throat, rendering him mute and thus establishing the film’s shhhhhh-shtick.
To John Woo, thanks for everything! Love, action fans
After pushing away his wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and wasting his time with a cop who plays by the book (Scott Mescudi), Brian takes matters into his own hands. Mostly by starring in a series of training montages. For what feels like a solid hour of screen-time, Woo captures Brian doing pull-ups, watching firearm tutorials on YouTube, buying and then modifying a car and installing a corkboard festooned with so many conspiratorial details about the hierarchy of a local drug cartel that it would put Oliver Stone to shame.
All the while, Brian slips in and out of flashbacks recalling happier times with his family, which Woo serves up with his typical enthusiasm for sob-soaked melodrama, although this time taken up several notches in gooeyness – perhaps a tacit admission that the director just wasn’t provided the budget and/or time required to balance the weepy histrionics with explosive violence.
When the carnage does arrive, it is all choppy street-level brawls and uninspired gunplay, the kind of bargain-basement action that feels directed by someone desperately trying to imitate John Woo (or John Wick). While there are several shoot-and-you’ll-miss-’em moments in which Woo seems to be pushing up against his production’s limitations – a gritty “one-shot” stairway brawl would be cool if the exact same sequence hadn’t already been done a dozen times over by everyone from Gareth Evans (The Raid) to Cary Joji Fukunaga (No Time to Die) – the ultimate result is a gut-shot to action diehards.
Kinnaman, who aside from James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad has never quite found a project that fits his unique blend of tenderness and bad-ass stoicism, offers as much intensity as he can in his wordless role. But his character’s quest for vengeance, and thus the actor’s anger-fuelled performance, is muddied by the script’s cringy racial politics: Brian’s enemies are not only Mexican criminals, but the kind of maniacally tattooed, crazy-eyed bad hombres fuelling a million MAGA fever dreams. That the film’s big trick requires all the villains to grunt instead of talk only adds to the queasy dehumanizing.
Some unsolicited advice, then, for the next time that John Woo is offered a Hollywood script: Shoot your shootings first, then ask questions about the dialogue, and budget, later.