Silent Night blasts into cinemas this week, joining the ranks of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon as a Christmas-themed actioner. While its certainly not the first film to try its hand at this blend of holiday-cheer and blood-shed since the 80’s — David Harbor took a swing as Santa himself just last year with Violent Night — few others have managed to pack a punch significant enough to hold any real lasting power, with most of them melting from our memories like snowflakes in the sun. Leave it to John Woo to change that trend, delivering a grounded and gritty tale of vengeance guaranteed to satisfy any fan of the genre.
Silent Night Plot
Godlock (Joel Kinnaman) is a father grieving the tragic death of his son at the hands of gang violence. Unable to move-on from the loss, he spends his every waking moment training and plotting for violent vengeance on the one-year anniversary of his son’s passing. Suffering from a gunshot wound to the throat, Godlock finds himself without the use of his voice. It’s a mostly dialogue-free, adrenaline-fueled action-epic from John Woo set at the happiest time of the year.
The Critique
Listen to ‘The Movie Divide’ Spoiler-Free Review Episode here: Silent Night Spoiler-Free Review
It’s impossible to discuss the film without first addressing the gimmick that lends itself to the title. Silent Night is nearly entirely void of dialogue. With the exception of a few indistinct murmurs and the sounds of police chatter on a radio, there are no spoken lines. The silence never feels natural, and the clearly intentional nature of its execution can be — admittedly — jarring. Characters enter rooms and rather than traditional and expected greetings, they stand in silence. For me, there was a roughly ten-minute adjustment period. Within that time I stopped noticing the lack of dialogue, and became fully submerged within the story and invested in the emotional elements of its central character.
There’s an unpolished recklessness to the action on display that feels contradictory to Woo’s typical flair. While entries like The Killer, Hard Boiled and — to a lesser extent — Hard Target flaunt what could be described as a ballet of bullets through their perfectly choreographed gun-battles, Silent Night is messy, highlighting the dangerous combination of inexperience and rage that fuels the protagonist’s vendetta. I had the great pleasure of speaking with Joel Kinnaman, and he explained that large segments of the action were intentionally left unchoreographed in-order to successfully achieve this frenetic and gritty delivery.
Joel Kinnaman proves he is an action star, delivering the best performance of his career without speaking a single word. It’s a testament to his skills as an actor that he can carry the weight of the film through a purely physical performance, successfully conveying the varied emotions necessary for the heavy subject matter. There’s a beauty to Silent Night that’s unexpected, glimmering through the grit and grime on its surface. It often feels reminiscent of a stage-production in the best possible way. That’s not surprising considering Kinnaman is no stranger to the stage, playing the role of Rodion Raskolnikov in a stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky’ Crime and Punishment.
In Conclusion
Silent Night is old-school John Woo with a new-school twist. It uses the lack of dialogue to its advantage, weaving a narrative free of exposition and fully reliant on the skills of Kinnaman and Woo to carry the story forward. The end result is a beautifully violent cinematic achievement, and the best John Woo film since Hard Boiled. A perfect gift to movie-goers this holiday season.
9/10
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