He’s back! John Woo returns with Silent Night for his first Hollywood film since 2003’s Paycheck. Though it may not reach the heights of his early Hong Kong action flicks like The Killer or the crazy thrills of his American ventures in the 90s like Face/Off. There are a few moments that remind you why fans still talk about him with reverence.
No fluttering doves here sadly. However, pleasingly enough, this movie does take place in a fictional town called Las Palomas which means ‘The Doves’ in Spanish. But many of Woo’s gleefully flamboyant trademarks remain his familiar beautifully choreographed shootouts interspersed with candles everywhere, freeze frames, a dead child, slow motion scenes to rival those seen on Garth Marenghi. Once it gets all Woo’d out completely bonkers and quite bloody.
The plot isn’t much: Joel Kinnaman plays a father who has lost a child to gang violence and wants revenge. That is pretty much all there is to it. Robert Archer Lynn’s screenplay is weirdly reactionary and backward-looking, newspaper headlines like “Gang violence claims another innocent victim” might well have been imported from the 1980s.
The opening sequence featuring a reindeer on a Christmas jumper suggests that the whole tone of the film is more somber than this. Kinnaman plays his revenge-oriented character with extreme seriousness. Which is carried out in every performance. Nevertheless, there are occasional moments where some lightness or comedy gets squeezed in, thus Brian’s act of writing “KILL THEM ALL” into his calendar is just beautiful. And a tear being dropped from someone’s face cut across to the bullet casing must be framed at Louvre.
At times this unconventional technique of having no words makes sense. They try their best to stare at each other soundlessly but they do not fully get free from Gimmick Valley. However, it does make the action scene kind of crazy in the sense that it retains Woo’s balletic badassery as became prominent during his Hong Kong days and got stuck with a super violent Buster Keaton mood. Silent Night turns out to be something of a mixed bag. But when Woo blows up bad guys using explosives and car crashes and gun-fu. This is what you can call an action nirvana.
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