[Review] Silent Night (3.5/10)

 

Title - Silent Night
Production - A Better Tomorrow Films, Capstone Studios, Corazon Films
Starring - Joel Kinnaman, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Kid Cudi, Harold Torres, Yoko Hamamura
Writer - Robert Archer Lynn
Director - John Woo
Release - 1 December 2023

This movie didn't even start off right. That slow-motion of Joel Kinnaman's character bouncing up and down onscreen with the ridiculous looking sweater did not help set the tone for what's to come.

And what's to come felt more like a gimmick today than, say, what Don't Breathe was able to achieve.

A whole movie with no dialogue. I would say a valiant effort but not even what was supposed to be the entertaining bits were entertaining.

So we saw how Kinnaman's character lost his voice. Then it felt like a 45 minutes of training and learning to shoot guns and fight. There's a reason why training sequences were squeezed into a montage in other movies, especially origin stories of superheroes. We actually had to suffer through every single detail, and it's not even him learning about superpowers, but just learning how to drive?

Then came the first fight scene. It was satisfactory. His first real fight. He's learning. Okay, let's move on to the next so we can get this show on the road. But no. Everything came to a halt again with surveillance and waiting. All this time with no dialogue.

And then we went into the final showdown at the bad guy's base. Of course the bad guys came one at a time. We don't want to overwhelm our hero, he's just human. I was bored. We've seen all these before in other movies. There was nothing new.

Kid Cudi's character joined in. He did nothing. Because when the bad guy, for whatever macho reason, decided to send his girlfriend with an Uzi on her lonesome, it was one against two, and the two good guys were already properly hiding, decided to do the dumb move and come out of hiding, while she was firing her Uzi, and both of them got shot unnecessarily.

And here's one thing I'll never understand what John Woo was thinking. This, I can only relate back to the cheesy sensibilities of Hong Kong movies back in the 90's; the bad guy played by Harold Torres, was doing a stupid slow dance with his girlfriend as his henchmen were getting killed. At first I thought, maybe he didn't know Kinnaman's breached his security. But then no, he just chose to do his stupid dance and then later send his dance partner out on her own.

I think John Woo is done. And it does pain me to say that because he was the father of action movies back in the 80's and 90's. Now, he's just being silly.