John Woo's dialogue-free Christmas movie is an unholy misfire

“Silent Night” is John Woo’s first American action film since 2003’s all-too-appropriate “Paycheck,” and the legendary Hong Kong auteur seems eager to make up for lost time. There are at least two decades of John Woo-ness crammed into the opening minutes from that hyper-florid Christmas riff “Taken,” which begins with Joel Kinnaman — clad in a Rudolph sweater, complete with a poofy 3-D nose — sprinting after Mexican gang members in slow motion while a computer-generated red balloon drifts by toward the sky. the distance and a music box sparkles on the soundtrack.

Despite the absence of flying doves (here, and in the rest of the story as well), the sheer degree of melodrama that is infused into this otherwise mundane chase sequence leaves no doubt as to who must have carried it out. And while the rest of “Silent Night” is so dreadful that its prologue might as well be the final hour of “Hard Boiled” by comparison, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting introduction to a film whose only good thing is the vulgar thrill of watching something that seems both completely anonymous and extremely idiosyncratic.

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On paper, the prospect of John Woo trying his hand at “Taken” — or even “Peppermint” — might seem promising, as the vigilante subgenre has suffered from extreme ineptitude behind the camera since the time Pierre Morel brought it all back. of the life support system (the best of these films were shot with a lack of vision that made them difficult to watch, while the others were shot with a lack of vision that made them difficult to see). Yes, “Silent Night” is a ripoff that ultimately steals as much from John Wick as it does from Liam Neeson, but even that might be more of a feature than a bug in the hands of a filmmaker with a transformational story. the tropes of pulp fiction in the makings of pop opera.

And Woo’s involvement isn’t even the most pronounced selling point here. That would be Robert Archer Lynn’s screenplay, which plays out without a single line of dialogue. You see, once Kinnaman’s Brian Godluck (lol) finally catches up with the gang members who just killed his son in a drive-by shootout with their rivals, he is rewarded for his efforts by being shot in the the vocal cords at close range. The bad news is that Brian will never be able to speak again, which is a real problem for someone who already has difficulty expressing his grief (his wife, played by an ungrateful Catalina Sandino Moreno, disappears precipitously after Brian stops talking). respond to their text messages). The good news is that stylized cinematic violence is a language unto itself, and it only takes a handful of very, very long training montages to learn to speak it fluently.

You know what’s great about removing all the dialogue from a very simple, very stupid vigilante story about an angry white man who massacres half the Latino population in his neighborhood in order to get to the boss gang who killed his son? It makes almost no difference. An Aaron Sorkin script without dialogue? Of course, this could be an interesting challenge (how do you say “we wanted you to be the first on this plane to know that our armed forces killed Osama bin Laden” with your eyes?). But, despite immortal witticisms like “I would like to take his head off…”, an American John Woo film without dialogue is like a Sofia Coppola film without a thermonuclear explosion – you don’t really feel the absence. of what is “missing”.

This is partly because our hero Brian Godluck doesn’t have much to say in the first place. And that’s partly because Woo’s incessant camera movements have always been far more expressive than his words (in this case, the zooms and swivels are blatant in a way that suggests Woo didn’t trust his actors to convey the emotions of their characters). In practice, this quickly ignored conceit becomes nothing more than an invitation for Woo to indulge his natural tendencies. In the past, this might have been a good thing.

Once Upon a Time was the Mayberry-style flashback in which Brian’s son becomes collateral damage in a gang shootout that spills over into Godluck’s suburban neighborhood – a baroque spectacle with the chintz-like sweetness of an advertisement political campaign – could have triggered an explosion. descent into hell, and the moment where Brian tears off the cross from around his neck could have laid the groundwork for a hyper-violent crisis of faith. Once upon a time, Brian’s hilarious shots of filling his cooking calendar (“12/24: Kill Them All”) might have paid off with a climactic suicide mission so ballet that families wanted to watch it every Christmas instead of ” Nutcracker “. .”

In the unholy “Silent Night,” however, all this florid excess devolves into nothing more than an ugly assault sequence in which the blandness of this material ultimately overwhelms all the eccentricity Woo brings to it. After an excruciatingly long hour which would take place at the rhythm of an Advent calendar, even without the unnecessary subplot about a local detective (Scott Mescudi) who sympathizes with Brian’s struggle (and gives our grieving hero tacit permission to murder every Mexican he sees), “Silent Night” ultimately arrives at her long-awaited reward only for pulling out a gun-fu fight on the stairs so basic it looks like a pre-visualization draft of the “Atomic Blonde” scene she’s copying.

The trip there may be John Woo coded down to its DNA, but the fireworks themselves are fourth-rate Hollywood cut-and-paste, right down to the obligatory computer-aided long shot that only manages to do everything in that seems all the less credible. The film’s only redeeming fight: a visceral kitchen brawl in the second act that, coincidentally, feels like you’re side-eyeing David Fincher for the stones to make. another hitman film titled “The Killer”.

I don’t know if John Woo dwelled on the success of 87Eleven’s action choreography, or if he simply lost interest in this deeply mundane story by the time he started filming its grand finale; Either way, “Silent Night” rewards your patience with a huge lump of coal. John Woo’s cinema does not lend itself to half-measures. With that in mind, the kindest thing I can say about his latest film – the likely nadir of a work made all the more endearing by its wild highs and lows – is that its worst moments don’t feel like the cinema by John Woo. at all.

Grade: D

Lionsgate will release “Silent Night” in theaters on Friday, December 1.

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