‘Silent Night’ Review
When the Mount Rushmore of action movie directors is erected, John Woo will undoubtedly have earned his rightful place. While his career began outside of action cinema, it was movies like A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Bullet in the Head, and Hard Boiled that had already cemented him as one of the greats throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. American audiences that weren’t aware of the director’s penchant for flying doves, slow-motion violence and explosions, and the “heroic bloodshed” subgenre of action films that Woo perfected, were made aware immediately with ‘90s classics like Hard Target, Broken Arrow, and his best film made stateside: 1997’s Face/Off. However, after a string of films that failed to move the needle in Hollywood, Woo found himself focused on historical and period films, eventually returning to his staple of action filmmaking with 2017’s Manhunt, and now, after another long hiatus, he’s returned to America with an experimental slice of holiday vengeance with Silent Night.
You’d be forgiven if you thought Woo hadn’t gone anywhere, though, based on the caliber of action throughout Silent Night and the attention to the emotional narrative that other directors would overlook when they have a gimmick as this film does: no one speaks. Opening with a scene of Brian (Joel Kinnaman) running down the streets of East Los Angeles on Christmas day in a blood-soaked reindeer sweater, Woo wastes no time setting up the premise of the film: a father’s son is killed in the crossfire of a gang shootout, his voice is lost through an altercation with one of the gang members, and from his grief he pivots into a planned act of revenge. Then, in a somewhat surprising turn of events, Woo - working off a screenplay from Robert Archer Lynn - takes his time getting back into the action. Instead, he focuses on the motivation through the grief and the destructive emotional impact it has on those left to bear its weight.
The Godlock family is left speechless at the tragic misfortune thrust upon them and while Brian literally sits in silence as he plots his revenge and drowns his sorrows, his wife Saya (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is forced to try and keep their relationship together. Woo spends an exorbitant amount of time on how grief can tear a family apart from the inside out. It’s surprisingly well-handled despite the inability to communicate with words - and a genuine refusal to do so when you’re stewing in your sadness - and just further emphasizes Woo’s ability to communicate through action and visuals. It’s also a testament to the fact that Woo’s films always have a heart at the center, even if it can sometimes get obfuscated by the dizzying spray of bullets and explosions. Some of the editing really ties that marriage together, including an incredible cut from a tear falling down someone’s cheek to a bullet casing hitting the ground. Some truly spectacular visual work is done to make up for that lack of dialogue.
Where Silent Night struggles, though, is everything outside of Brian and Saya’s relationship - specifically with the gamble of not having anyone speak when there’s no narrative justification for them not to speak. Detective Vassell (Scott Mescudi a.k.a Kid Cudi) is the first on the scene of Brian and Saya’s child’s death, but he never utters a word. Brian keeps tabs on gang members, watching their operations unfold, and none of them seem to speak. Moments where dialogue would make sense are sacrificed at the altar of experimentation. It doesn’t work outside of the two grieving parents unable to connect with each other. Thanks to the film spending so much of its runtime in the training and preparation for Brian to take on an entire gang, the film buckles under the weight of its hook. It occasionally conjures up a clever workaround, but it always feels like that: a workaround.
It’s also a film lacking much nuance besides its central character. The gangs are Latino, of course, and just feels like lazy screenwriting. Since there’s no dialogue, they’re also treated as cannon fodder, and that’s about it, with the exception of the one gang member singled out because he has an instantly recognizable feature: a tattoo. It’s such a reductive screenplay. There’s also Woo’s filmography and its history of propping up police figures which feels slightly interrogated in Silent Night, but only on a surface level. Nothing is handled with care, it’s mostly just a canvas for Woo to remind Western audiences of his masterful ability to craft memorable action sequences. Even the dialogue-free gimmick isn’t adhered to completely, instead allowing for radio chatter and the occasional and briefly whispered “sorry” and “thank you.”
Most audiences are not coming to a John Woo film for its narrative though. While that’s a shame as films like Bullet in the Head still hurt emotionally just as much as they look like they do physically, Silent Night does deliver in its carnage. Once it finally gets to it, there’s a creativity to so many of the kills and setpieces that it really does feel like Woo just went into stasis and then came back as if the last movie he made was Face/Off. That’s not to besmirch his films since then, but the way the action plays out still feels like trademark Woo. It’s unmistakably performative and kinetic while still carrying a visceral weight to every shot fired and stab inflicted. Kinnaman holds a lot of the film on his shoulders before the action takes off and it does come to a satisfying conclusion when all that training and preparation comes into play. The car chases, in particular, have some ingenuity and burliness to them that accentuates that feeling of someone putting all their effort into a single task.
It’s unfortunate that Silent Night is as burdened with its no-dialogue approach as it is because it hurts every other aspect of the film. While the action is spectacularly bloody and exciting, it feels like it’s making up for the film’s shortcomings as opposed to being a culmination of all the parts working together. It’s great to see such a prolific action director back in cinemas doing what he does best, but it’s a struggle to recommend Silent Night to anyone other than Woo diehards and action film junkies. While it does deliver in some surprisingly emotional ways, Silent Night is often dragged down by its own machinations.
