Movie Review: Silent Night

Any lingering excitement I had about John Woo's return to English-language cinema after a 20-year hiatus died by the halfway mark of Silent Night. The Hong Kong action titan basically came back to the US to make an inferior, (nearly) dialogue-free riff on the not-exactly-great 2018 Pierre Morel/Jennifer Garner feature Peppermint. That's like if Tom Brady came out of retirement this spring to play in the XFL, only to go 5-7 and fail to make the playoffs.

Expecting Woo to return to the scene with the next Hard Boiled, The Killer or even Face/Off would've been extremely unfair. Expecting something that demonstrates anything above the base level of  competency for a theatrical action movie however would be totally reasonable and Silent Night simply does not do that. 

Over the past five years or so, you'd be hard-pressed to find something in this genre that is more comfortable with just coasting along than Silent Night. It absolutely looks the part of an R-rated shoot'em up extravaganza as bullets fly, cars crash and bodies explode on screen. All of these things just happen to be delivered with so little panache or urgency that they land with zero weight whatsoever. Some signs of life show up at the 11th hour in the form of a solid final action setpiece that is primarily driven by an extended winding stairwell shootout, but it's far too little, far too late to save this film from avoiding its aggressively mediocre fate. 

What's most disheartening about Silent Night is that all the roads responsible for its failure lead back to Woo. Joel Kinnaman gives a committed lead performance as a revenge-seeking father left mute by a bullet wound that's out to avenge the death of his son a year after he was murdered by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting, the sound mixing does a great job of accentuating the sounds of its environment to compensate for the lack of speaking without overdoing it to the point where it becomes distractingly loud or chaotic and while undeniably generic, Robert Archer Lynn's script has the bones for a solid meat-and-potatoes action flick if it were made with style and urgency. But alas their efforts to deliver a commendable genre effort are stomped out by a legend who has either lost his directorial  instincts or whose heart simply isn't in it anymore now that he's hit his late 70's. How Woo's next project-an English-language remake of his aforementioned 1989 classic The Killer starring Omar Sy and Nathalie Emmanuel-turns out will reveal more about where he truly is at this stage of his career, but Silent Night makes a pretty convincing argument that he should've remained retired.           

Grade: C