The Big Picture
- Silent Night disappoints with a derivative plot and monotonous character development, failing to deliver on its potential for action cinema.
- The film's failure to fully commit to its "silent" gimmick and lack of creativity in incorporating the Christmas theme are major letdowns.
- The movie's retrograde depictions of race, gender, and policing institutions cater to an outdated audience, making it uninteresting for action movie enthusiasts.
Actions speak louder than words, they say, and that's especially true when it comes to Brian Godluck (Joel Kinnaman), the protagonist of the new John Woo action movie Silent Night. Previously a happy-go-lucky family man, Godluck's life was turned into trauma-ridden chaos after the gangster Playa (Harold Torres) inadvertently killed his young son on Christmas Day. In the immediate aftermath of this horrific event, Godluck was shot in the neck and lost the ability to use his vocal cords. No longer able to speak and distressed over the loss of his child, Godluck harbors a deeper hankering for grisly revenge against the gangsters responsible for all this sorrow.
Silent Night
A grieving father enacts his long-awaited revenge against a ruthless gang on Christmas Eve.
- Release Date
- December 1, 2023
- Director
- John Woo
- Cast
- Joel Kinnaman, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Kid Cudi, Harold Torres
- Rating
- R
- Runtime
- 104 minutes
- Main Genre
- Action
- Genres
- Action
- Writers
- Robert Archer Lynn
Godluck proceeds to spend the next year preparing his body and sharpening his skills so he can go after Playa and company. That’s the crux of the first American feature helmed by Woo in two decades, an occasion that should be an event for action cinema devotees everywhere. Alas, the man responsible for thrilling gems like Hard Target and Face/Off is on autopilot here. Silent Night squanders so much potential that it ends up becoming one of the most disappointing movies of 2023.
What is 'Silent Night' About?
The most befuddling drawback to Silent Night, without question, is the morose tone of Robert Archer Lynn's screenplay. The script's primary focus for the first two acts is just exploring Godluck trudging around his house in a fog of sorrow over his dead son or watching YouTube videos to train himself in knife fights. It's a motion picture in love with foreplay that never actually goes anywhere interesting. Worst of all, the set-up is utterly monotonous. None of the intimate character work is very interesting since figures like Godluck's wife Saya (Catalina Sandino Moreno) remain surface-level caricatures at best. The film forgets that the point of low-key character-driven sequences is to deliver insight into the minds of fictional people.
It'd be one thing if Silent Night was just a bunch of bullets flying for two hours. It's downright criminal that its action movie premise stalls out for well over an hour of flat attempts at domestic drama. The tediousness of the movie at least allows one to appreciate just how derivative the proceedings are of other action movies. Previous American features helmed by Woo had their highs and lows, but the best of them reveled in maximalist absurdity, like anything involving Wilfred Brimley in Hard Target. Even Woo's middling Mission: Impossible II had flaws (like those endless mask reveals) that you weren't going to get in any other Mission: Impossibleinstallment.
Here, Joel Kinnaman's protagonist evokes Jack Bauer and countless other 2000s action heroes in using torture to get what he wants while the racist caricatures that pass for villains are seemingly lifted from a CBS procedural. Worst of all, the action sequences are all just echoes of better shootouts and skirmishes from better movies, like a third-act staircase fight that harkens back to a similar sequence in No Time to Die. Even when it’s time for people to punch and shoot each other, Silent Night fails to generate much of a pulse or sense of creativity. Only the production design utilized in a climactic backdrop consisting of Playa’s disco-esque bedroom (complete with gigantic glistening Christmas ornaments) has any sort of visual panache or imagination. Otherwise, the distinctiveness that defined Woo's most seminal works is gone, replaced with a run-of-the-mill vigilante movie sorely lacking in energy.
“Silent Night” Fails to Deliver as Either a Silent Film or a Christmas Movie
But the greatest sin of Silent Night, without question, is its failure to committ to its "silent" gimmick. Silent Night largely eschews dialogue to match its voiceless protagonist, but unlike fellow 2023 “silent” genre feature No One Will Save You, it doesn't go all the way in being a totally silent movie. Talking heads on the radio, police scanners dishing out expository dialogue, gangsters with their mouths muffled, they all blabber throughout Silent Night. Communication between characters (namely our hero and his wife) is handled through on-screen text messaging or, in one case, a lengthy letter that scrolls across the screen. This motion picture seems more obsessed with finding “cheats” around being a silent feature rather than embracing all the unique opportunities of not relying on dialogue.
The whole production is so generically assembled that even the elements that should flourish in a movie light on dialogue (like Marco Beltrami’s score) feel phoned in. Having Silent Night be a Christmas movie also proves a wash, since neither Woo’s filmmaking nor Lynn’s script really find super imaginative ways to incorporate the holiday into the story beyond some ham-fisted needle drops and a beleaguered cop saying, “Some Christmas this is!” during a tense shootout. The yuletide backdrop of Godluck’s rampage is just another aspect of Silent Night that never goes anywhere interesting.
The only thing Silent Night really commits to is being a cinematic fantasy exclusively for baby boomer viewers or anyone old enough to gripe about "those kids today." Our villains are defined as baddies by being Black and brown, listening to loud rap music, being on their phones, and having tattoos all over their bodies. The role of women is to be helpless victims to be saved by a white man, while any sort of criticism of policing institutions (such as a piece of graffiti reading "Eff the police" that the camera lingers in horror over in an early scene) is depicted as evil incarnate. It’s perfect material for Tucker Carlson fans, but yawn-worthy for action movie devotees who’ve seen such elements thousands of times before.
These retrograde details rooted in yesteryear do help explain why Silent Night feels like the cinematic equivalent of reheated Christmas dinner leftovers at least. When your script embraces arcane racial and gender depictions, your action sequences can inevitably also feel old hat. Combining Christmastime with a vengeful killer who can't talk should be excitingly trashy, not a motion picture that comes off like a rip-off of Charles Bronson star vehicles. What a shame even a master filmmaker like John Woo couldn’t at least partially liven up a derivative piece of action cinema like Silent Night.
Grade: D
Silent Night begins playing in theaters everywhere in the U.S. on December 1. Click below for showtimes.
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