Silent Night is the latest movie from director John Woo. Many of the movies he has directed are staples for my childhood, such as Face Off, Broken Arrow, Paycheck, and Mission Impossible 2. It was just a few weeks ago that I first saw the trailer for this and maybe that should have been a warning. The lack of marketing and a trailer that gives too much away worried me but I still wanted to check this one out.
Silent Night is nothing really new. It’s taking an approach of little to no dialogue around its story. This time we’re following a revenge story taking place during Christmas.
Godlock (Joel Kinnaman) is the main character we follow. He lives a pretty ordinary life with his wife and son. Coming home from a days work, a gang is racing down the street shooting at each other and his family is caught in the crossfire. Witnessing his son’s death, he goes after the gang only to be shot in the throat to lose his voice. Surviving the attack, he now dedicates his life to bringing down this gang.
Since Nicholas Cages performance in Willy’s Wonderland I’m always intrigued by these no dialog movies. Just seeing the character development through their actions and emotions is fascinating and Cage really pulled it off in Wonderland. I will say that Kinnamon has a decent performance here. You really understand the love for his family and the rage that he has after the incident. It’s just that everything else in this movie didn’t work for me.
The action scenes, while cool, were limited. It’s really about the opening and ending for this movie. Godlock doesn’t have a background in fighting or weaponry so much of this movie is spent around him training and preparing for his revenge plan. There is nothing wrong with this but I did think it drug on a bit too long. Most of the 1st and 2nd act (after the opening action scene) takes too much time at a fairly slow pace. We know what his plans are and I just wanted to get there much quicker.
The final moments of the movie are very entertaining but it does feel like it takes a lot of nods to the John Wick movies. Many scenes felt like something I had seen before and there are some odd moments with the gang members that could have been explored more to build more character development for them.
Those moments are where dialog could have helped. We primarily get dialog through the tv and radios playing throughout the movie. There are some moments where some of the characters will say something but it’s purposefully softened and muffled. The main few characters never speak a word through the full runtime though.
With the bad pacing, odd character moments, lack of depth, and missteps with no dialog, this movie just didn’t work for me. If we had a little more action or even more connection to the gang world or the main detective in the movie I think this could have been something worth revisiting each year during the Christmas holiday.
Raring: 1.5/5
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