Sometimes in life you just have to feel sorry for Joel Kinneman. I mean the man has a knack for picking projects that sound good and safe on paper but just don’t work on the planet Earth. I mean this poor sod has been in the robocop remake (2014), both Suicide Squad films (2016 and 2021) as well as Chil 44 (2015) That one starred Tom Hardy and was based on a really good, really solid book.
Check it out if you need a detective thriller to read one holiday.
It’s set in Stalins Russia.
And today this poor unfortunate soul has agreed to be in Silent Night. Which whilst plot wise is basically your bog standard Punisher origin story movie that you’ve seen a million times before – dead kid, dad swears revenge, becomes badass, police are useless and or corrupt, big firefight at the end with evil drugs gang – Except it completely screws it up.
All right so the first interesting idea is that this film has virtually no spoken dialogue. Which I find interesting but there’s nothing really done with it beyond demonstrate that this type of film so is basic that it doesn’t NEED dialogue for everyone to understand what’s going on.
Or it’s that the characters or so thin that you could shine a light through them with a 2 watt lightbulb but that’s neither here nor there.
No, I have a spurious unresearched feeling that what attracted poor sweet Joel to this film was the director.
John Woo.
Now for any energy drink addicted, Tik-Tokking, vaping Fortnight playing 12 year olds currently scratching their heads in confusion, John Woo made films before the dark times, before Iron Man in 2008. Films like Face/off, Broken Arrow and Mission Impossible 2 amongst others.
Films with panache, style, doves!- Ask your dad if you don’t get that one.
And then there’s also the fact that our Punisher wannabe learns all of his bad assness not from being a former Ranger, Seal, Marine etc.
He gets it all from YouTube.
So… you see where my head was at, right?
A fairly solid actor with a decent grounding in action films with comedic leanings, a director who made erm… interesting action films back in the day, a basic, tried-and-true story structure full of one dimensional characters..
I mean the freaking John Wick films were partially based upon his work and here he comes back to show why he’s the master!!!!
Except at some point in the last few years he’s had a bash on the head and forgotten everything or been replaced by his evil twin or he was replaced by an alien clone or ….
Because this went down faster than my script editors lead balloon juggling “cancel me if you dare” stand up comedy routine on the titanic.
Let’s start with the basics – The pacing sucks. There’s only one major fight scene towards the end by then most people have checked out. It takes way too long to get going, there’s normally a fight scene at the mid-point to show everyone that now everything’s getting going but there isn’t, the fact that there’s no spoken dialogue means that by default you don’t really care about anyone, the villains are just cartoonishly evil, there’s only really one fight scene in the entire film, our lead learns to fight via YouTube videos and there’s only one major if very dull fight scene.
And speaking of our ‘badass via YouTube’ lead, he’s established early on to be an engineer of some description (no dialogue means no exposition. Or the terrible Marvel quips that are ruining cinema.) So I was wondering if he was ging to come up with some kind of budget gadgets- smoke bombs and the like but no. We get one tripwire and that’s your lot. Oh, sorry, you wanted something fun, exciting and interesting to happen in this film one fight scene? No. Just frowny faced people very seriously shooting each other in silence.
Oh, and this film is also very depressing to look at and somehow left a nasty taste in my mouth.
But my main issue with this film is simply that… It plays it all straight.
I mean all the ingredients are here for a really cool, dark satire of the standard Punisher origin story, no dialogue because we know it all by heart, our lead is a no-one who learns all his skills online- our villains are an evil drug gang who know the local train timetable by heart.
Now imagine what someone with a twinkle in their eye and their tongue in their cheek could do with that. Hell, imagine what the JOHN WOO of 15 years ago could have done with that! Instead it’s just this dark, miserable little film where it’s dialogue-free gimmick quickly becomes tiresome because the soundtrack isn’t very good, the fight scenes show no marital arts, swords (which I’m 100% certain a dingus who got all his training online would defiantly have done.) Gadgets, or anything but guns, which quickly becomes tiresome. Even the final battle was a snoozefest.
So yeah, Silent Night is an amazing idea for a dark satire which plays it completely straight whilst at the same time being dull, uninteresting, slow and mean spirited film being made by a director who seems to have regressed to being a straight-to-streaming hack for hire.
Just watch Violent Night instead (2022)
And please, if you see Joel Kinneman in a bar, buy him a pint. Poor sods earned it. And needs to fire his agent.
My Score- Skip It
danielsdunkings 