John Woo's Silent Night Is Talky But Good

Woo is back, baby!

I will admit, upfront that I cheated with this week’s Nathan Rabin's Bad Ideas new movie selection. You beautiful people chose Dream Scenario, the trippy new Nicolas Cage film, over Silent Night, John Woo’s first American movie since Paycheck. 

I discovered, to my surprise and horror, that if I wanted to watch and write up Dream Scenario I would have to travel fifteen miles and spend something in the area of seventy-five dollars on Lyft rides. 

I don’t want to brag, but I almost couldn’t be doing worse financially so I called an audible and chose to write about a movie that almost won the poll, was playing at the local movie theater and looked incredibly intriguing. 

Besides, I’m professionally obligated to cover Dream Scenario for the Travolta/Cage podcast, The Travolta/Cage Project and eventually the Travolta/Cage book. 

So it seemed a little redundant to cover Dream Scenario for Substack and then, a few months later, for Travolta/Cage. 

I’m glad that I chose Silent Night. I’d watched Todd Haynes’ May December earlier that day and while the two films couldn’t be more different tonally, thematically and in every other way watching May December and Silent Night I felt like I was in the sure hands of a master, someone who is better at their job than just about anyone else alive. 

For Haynes, that means making intense, aesthetically pleasing melodramas about the stormy, complicated lives of women played by Julianne Moore. For Woo, that means lovingly crafting operatic action melodramas about violent, obsessive men. 

John Woo’s American career got off to an extraordinary start with the 1-2-3 punch of Hard Target, Broken Arrow and my personal favorite, Face/Off. These masterpieces brought Woo to the United States with his swagger, ambition and mastery intact. 

Then came a trio that felt disconcertingly impersonal. It’s fitting that Woo’s final American film before Silence was titled Payday because that’s what these movies seemed to be to Woo: a payday gig with little personal investment. 

Woo unsurprisingly went back to making movies in Hong Kong before Silent Night brought him back to the States for an audacious stunt that doubles as a badass action movie. 

The gimmick of Silent Night is that it is a film devoid of dialogue, where everything is communicated visually rather through words. Woo cheats a bit at times. There is at least one “Fuck you!” said softly but insistently, and we’re treated to some patter on the radio but for the most part Woo works within the limits that he has set for himself. 

In action movies, dialogue generally involves a break in the action, literally and figuratively. That helps explain the film’s pummeling intensity. Once Brian begins his quest for vengeance Silent Night pumps it up to 11 and stays there until the credits roll.

The result is Woo's best American film since Face/Off, a stunning master class in choreographed carnage. 

Woo’s silent movie stars the wonderfully expressive Joel Kinnaman stars as Brian Godlock. He’s a happily married husband and father leading the kind of impossibly idyllic existence that is inevitably shattered by violence in this film like these. 

In this case that happiness-shattering violence takes the form of Brian’s son being killed by a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting and Brian getting shot in the throat in a way that severely damages his vocal cords but does not kill him. 

Brian’s son’s death changes him on a profound level. He turns himself into a blunt instrument for revenge, a human killing machine who does not hesitate when it is time to go in for the kill. 

The anti-hero accomplishes this not through a single training montage, or even several training montages, but rather through an entire training first act or first half. 

Silent Night is gloriously literal-minded. It doesn’t just show Brian firing guns while driving an automobile like a NASCAR contender; it first shows us Brian training himself over and over and over until he has developed the unique skill set required to basically slaughter an entire street gang that is none too shabby at killing themselves. It doesn’t just have Brian fatally stab multiple gang members; it first establishes that he has practiced extensively with knives and guns and other instruments of purposeful destruction and has gotten very good at it.

I’m not sure that I've ever seen an action movie that devoted more screen time to a lead character practicing and practicing and practicing so that he can be as good at killing violent criminals as he can possibly be. 

Woo lingers on Brian’s pain and grief in a way that would be tasteless and manipulative if it were not handled in such an artful fashion. The heartbroken parent or partner who lost their loved ones to violence is a ubiquitous action movie but Woo allows us to really feel Brian’s pain on a visceral level. With Woo and Silent Night, there’s no such thing as going too far. Too excessive isn’t enough for this gut-punch of an action movie.

Silent Night is like a less canine-focussed John Wick. This is going to sound crazy, but for some people, losing a human child is an even greater loss than being permanently separated from an extremely cute dog. 

Brian decides to enact revenge on Christmas Eve. He's even written “Kill ‘em all” on his calendar as a helpful reminder to kill every last one of the bastards he holds responsible for his son’s death. 

Silent Night’s second half pays off its first half in a delightfully satisfying way. Brian decides to put his plan into action and begins killing poorly differentiated gang members of color in extremely intense, extravagant ways. 

It's one epic set-piece after another as Brian gets closer and closer to killing the big boss most responsible for his pain and the destruction of his family and his life. Overkill doesn’t begin to do justice to the excessive brutality of Brian’s plan. He doesn't just want to kill dozens and dozens of folks who didn’t contribute much to society; he wants to make them suffer the way that he has as well. 

I had an ex-girlfriend who works at Midway when its big game was Woo’s Stranglehold. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Silent Night feels like a video game in a positive sense, with Brian as the first-person shooter and each of the tableaus a different stage in the game. 

With Silent Night, Woo has created something close to pure cinema. It’s a knockout that brings the preeminent auteur roaring back  even if it seems doomed to be a cult favorite and not a mainstream hit. 

Four Stars out of five