‘Silent Night’ Review: John Woo Lets Guns Do the Talking in Tight Dialogue-Free Revenge Thriller
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If John Woo had permitted the characters in “Silent Night” to speak, chances are that audiences would laugh them off the screen. Instead, the director gets right down to business, opening with a wordless chase sequence in which a sad dad (Joel Kinnaman) in a corny Christmas sweater sprints after a pair of speeding cars. Inside the vehicles, bad men blast machine guns, while our nameless hero is armed with … just his wits and the jingle bell around his neck.
By the time this guy — identified as Brian Godlock in the end credits — catches up to the gang members who murdered his son, “Silent Night” has already demonstrated that Woo has no intention of letting logic get in his way. And why should we expect any different from the director of “Face/Off,” whose title-says-it-all gimmick had two rivals swapping identities via plastic surgery? The movie dedicates a lot of time to watching Brian mourn and his marriage dissolve (Catalina Sandino Moreno plays the wife who leaves without a word), but the child’s death is just the trigger. The movie needs an excuse to send his angry father on a rampage.
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Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Woo almost single-handedly rewrote the codes of action cinema. Then “The Matrix” stole his tricks, and Woo’s own movies started to feel less impressive than his imitators’ (for all its showmanship, “Mission: Impossible II” already felt like a parody of a John Woo movie). Silly as it might be, “Silent Night” gives audiences reason to get excited about the Hong Kong innovator once again, ranking as one of the few bloody Christmas counterprogrammers since “Die Hard” that feels worthy of repeat viewing down the road.
“Silent Night” is not, as its title might suggest, a silent movie. Between all those bullets and Marco Beltrami’s pulsating score, it’s quite a noisy one, in fact. What Woo’s return to American shores really represents is an extended stab at what Alfred Hitchcock called “pure cinema”: using the camera, editing and sound design — rather than dialogue — to tell the story. Better yet, it’s a hat tip to French director Jean-Pierre Melville, an idol of Woo’s, who pared the talk down to a bare minimum in his masterpieces “Le Samouraï” and “Le Cercle Rouge.”
Brian wants revenge. He nearly gets it in that opening scene, dispatching most of the gang members (one smashes face-first into a forklift, snapping his head clean off) before suffering the injury that gives “Silent Night” its name: The film’s villain — a tattooed thug known as Playa (Harold Torres) — shoots him in the throat, effectively destroying his vocal cords. A few months go by, and Brian’s body recovers. But he can’t speak or scream. Brian internalizes his rage, and Swedish actor Kinnaman (of the “Easy Money” series) is a fine avatar for the grieving father who plots his ho-ho-homicidal reprisal for the following Christmas.
It doesn’t take a terribly sophisticated screenplay to fill in the gaps. In fact, the genre is so overplayed that writer Robert Archer Lynn can count on audiences to put the basics together. In one of the film’s first images, a red balloon floats above an inner-city neighborhood, suggesting — much as Fritz Lang did all those years ago when a child goes missing in “M” — that an innocent life has been taken.
The movie skips right over whatever efforts the cops make toward finding the culprits and simplifies Brian’s own search: He walks into the police office, recognizes a mugshot of the man who shot him and starts prepping for payback. What would a dialogue-free action movie be without a training montage? The movie never indicates what Brian does for a living, but one thing’s certain: He’s not a lethal professional like John Wick. That means he must learn how to drive and shoot like an action hero, and when he first kidnaps one of Playa’s goons, the interrogation goes spectacularly awry.
The tone of “Silent Night” is deadly serious, but one can feel Woo having fun behind the camera, and his amusement translates back to the audience in a big way. Only Woo could pull off many of the camera tricks on display here, while others — including an extended shootout in the graffiti-tagged stairwell leading up to Playa’s lair — suggest that he’s been watching what directors such as Chad Stahelski and David Leitch have been up to (in “John Wick” and “Atomic Blonde”), and wants to offer his own take on the gratuitous “oner” trend.
A few of Woo’s tactics may feel familiar, but for the most part, “Silent Night” provides an opportunity to flex within the movie’s no-talking rules. Putting Brian behind the wheel of a reinforced Ford Mustang is a fine place to start. Woo cheats a bit by having characters communicate by text messages and handwritten notes (it makes sense that Brian and his wife would do that, but not so much the gangsters), while honoring the basic challenge of communicating what audiences need to know via action.
Perhaps the trickiest example occurs when the detective on the case, Dennis Vassel (Scott Mescudi, better known to most as the rapper Kid Cudi), catches up with Brian at the top of the aforementioned staircase. With guns pointed at one another — a signature of many a classic John Woo movie — the two men exchange a long, silent stare in lieu of a conversation. And then the blasting resumes at full volume, with nary a word spoken. Elsewhere, characters might say something like “OK” or “hey,” but “Silent Night” works better without dialogue to get in the way of whatever carnage its restless hero requires in order to sleep in heavenly peace once again.
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