Silent Night (2023)

I can imagine the excitement that director John Woo must have felt when he was given the option to make an action film in which the lead character didn't speak. Maybe there was an earlier script draft that had some other characters speaking, maybe there wasn't, but Woo surely relished the opportunity to deliver his trademark visual flourishes with no pesky dialogue dragging things down. It's certainly a strong central idea, but it's one that cannot be maintained for the length of a feature. Nobody wanted to tell Woo that, however, which leaves us with this.

Joel Kinnaman plays Brian Godlock, a man we first see chasing after some gun-fighting gangsters. He manages to deal with some of them before being shot, and left for dead, by Playa (Harold Torres). He somehow survives though, although his voice doesn't. After time spent recovering in the hospital, Brian starts on a path of revenge. It turns out that those gun-fighting gangsters accidentally killed his son. Getting himself armed and learning techniques from online videos, Brian doesn't care if he survives his quest. He only cares about taking the life of the man who killed his son. Oh, and there are some Christmas trimmings scattered here and there, seemingly just to work with the film title, like all of the non-speaking characters.

Written by Robert Archer Lynn, someone who must have been extremely grateful to have grabbed the interest of Woo, Silent Night has infrequent moments that hint at a much better film, but it’s generally a woeful experience. The fact that the central concept won’t actually work becomes clear quite early on, leaving viewers hoping for some patented Woo action, but Woo seems to have more faith in the script than it deserves.

Although there are some action sequences, none of them really hit the dizzyingly high bar set by Woo throughout many of the previous highlights of his filmography. In fact, the gunfire is particularly weak, Woo instead doing a much better job this time around with some car-based carnage. The varying quality of the action may not be so bad if alongside some strong dramatic performances, but the cast are all hampered by the lack of standard dialogue.

Kinnaman can be a great actor in the right roles. This is not one of the right roles for him. Watching him attempt to yell out in rage with no sound coming from his voicebox is just one of many poor, occasionally laughable, moments. Kid Cudi, billed here as Scott Mescudi, is a cop who ends up drawn into the trail of violence, but his character could have been played by almost anyone. As for Torres, he is a generic villain with no real charisma or personality, basically waiting around to be confronted as the “final boss”. None of those people are treated as poorly as Catalina Sandino Moreno, who has to play the suffering wife who also chooses not to speak to her voiceless husband (for no reason other than the script requires her to, because . . . Silent Night).

Many fans of Woo may have been waiting for his return to American movie-making, but I think this just proves that he continues to do his best work in his home country. I love both of his Travolta-starring movies, and I actually don’t mind Paycheck, but it remains obvious that fans of his action and style would be better off revisiting his impressive back catalogue than awaiting any new mainstream offerings from him. Each one offers disappointingly diminishing returns.

3/10

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