John Woo’s Recent Criticisms in the Film Industry

As a legend of both Hong Kong and Hollywood, John Woo’s recent criticisms of Marvel and the likes are absolutely worth their weight. However, they couldn’t have come at a worse time for the famed action auteur.

His latest directorial effort, the Joel Kinnaman-led Silent Night, plays at best like a Punisher fan film, and at worst like a failed film school assignment, whose parameters – a mostly dialogue-free experiment – become a gimmick it can’t sustain.

Silent Night Gallery

The result here is similar, but the fall from grace hits even harder, since Silent Night is very much in the vein of those aforementioned action classics. (M:I 2 included – its story may be a bore, but it’s one of the sexiest and coolest looking Hollywood movies of the 21st century.) That any film feels this much like a failure to mimic distinctiveness is tragic; that’s intensified by the fact that it represents Woo grasping for former glory.

Kinnaman plays Brian Godlock, husband to Saya (Catalina Sandino Moreno), first and last names we learn as they trickle out via text messages and other convenient methods of conveying info nonverbally, across the first hour or so.

This backstory deftly unfolds through flashbacks which emerge without cutting away (or, at least, through hidden cuts), as Brian relives happy memories with his child, and his dull and empty household becomes momentarily filled with golden light. The warmth, however, fades, and Brian eventually – after a very long while – decides retribution is the only way out of his drunken stupor.

That Brian can no longer speak imbues his scenes with focus and frustration. The Swedish Kinnaman continues expanding his repertoire of all-American badasses with vulnerable human cores (RoboCop, Captain Rick Flag, and so on) as he prepares for a vengeful mission against the people responsible for his grief. He’s downright excellent in the role.

The problem is, these scenes of preparation take up practically the entire movie – at least an hour and change of its 104 minutes – without a hint of a John Wick-style point of no return.

Instead, the scrappy, direct-to-video visual approach does Silent Night’s lofty attempts at action grandeur no favors, since most of them fall flat. When the camera does hold – on lengthy staircase and hallway scenes reminiscent of Marvel’s faux-gritty Netflix output – the result is equally lacking in consequence, since the movie’s villains seem to sustain no damage until there’s a final killshot.

Silent Night is a weightless, witless, artless film

The sincerity of Kinnaman’s performance, coupled with the camera’s unyielding focus on him amid the bloodshed, results in an ugly cinematic conundrum. Each questionable storytelling decision yields boring, weightless, digitally enhanced action.