Search results
movieinsider.com
- Silent Night reaffirms that an action movie doesn't need much dialogue if the set pieces are solid enough -- and that even second-tier John Woo can be worth the price of admission. Read Critics Reviews Silent Night has some decent action scenes, but it takes too long to get going and the story isn't anything special.
www.rottentomatoes.com › m › silent_night_2023
People also ask
Is Silent Night directed by John Woo?
Did John Woo allow the characters to speak in Silent Night?
Is 'Silent Night' a good movie?
Is John Woo a good movie?
Dec 1, 2023 · John Woo’s new film is a revenge thriller with such a predictable plot that one can imagine the first multicellular organisms distributing an electrochemical version of it to each other through osmosis. It's also one of Woo's best, and one of the most deliriously cinematic movies of the year.
- Christ, this savior is boring
- Silent Night Gallery
- What's your favorite John Woo movie?
- Verdict
By Siddhant Adlakha
Updated: Nov 27, 2023 7:42 pm
Posted: Nov 27, 2023 5:00 pm
Silent Night opens in theaters Friday, December 1.
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.
It’s an action movie that never fully takes off, with an ugly, borderline racist core that seldom justifies itself by enhancing the gaudy spectacle for which Woo is generally known. As the man behind The Killer, Hard Boiled, Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2, his films come with audacious stylistic expectations, but the Christmas-themed revenge thriller is more akin to his last American movie: the 2003 Ben Affleck vehicle Paycheck, which mostly lacked Woo’s signature panache, and was swallowed whole by a half-baked sci-fi concept.
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. The film’s gimmick is a near-total lack of dialogue, owing to Brian being shot in the throat during an in-medias-res opening, in which he sports a blood-stained Christmas sweater and gives chase to two different cars filled with heavily tattooed Hispanic hoodlums swerving through narrow New Mexico streets. (Keep their ethnicity in mind; it’s all that matters in the movie’s purview.)
A Better Tomorrow
Face/Off
Hard Boiled
The Killer (1989)
Mission: Impossible 2
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.
A boring, weightless revenge experiment that quickly goes awry, Silent Night features none of the charm or visual panache that made John Woo one of Hong Kong and Hollywood’s foremost action stylists. Joel Kinnaman is committed to the role of a silent, vengeful father, but no other cinematic element coalesces around him to make his journey worthwhil...
- Siddhant Adlakha
Nov 30, 2023 · Martin Scorsese, now 81, put out the tortured and indignant “Killers of the Flower Moon” this year. And now the inspired action filmmaker, John Woo, 77, delivers the merciless revenge shoot-em...
- 104 min
- Glenn Kenny
Dec 1, 2023 · Silent Night reaffirms that an action movie doesn't need much dialogue if the set pieces are solid enough -- and that even second-tier John Woo can be worth the price of admission. Read...
- (119)
- John Woo
- R
- Thunder Road Pictures
Nov 27, 2023 · Nov 27, 2023 9:00am PT. ‘Silent Night’ Review: John Woo Lets Guns Do the Talking in Tight Dialogue-Free Revenge Thriller. Just when many audiences may have written off the innovative Hong...
Dec 20, 2023 · Movie Review: John Woo’s new action film Silent Night. movie review Dec. 20, 2023. There’s No Heroism or Fantasy in John Woo’s Brutal Silent Night. By Bilge Ebiri, a film...
Nov 27, 2023 · Movie Reviews. ‘Silent Night’ Review: Joel Kinnaman in John Woo’s Gripping Hollywood Comeback. The actor stars in the director's first American film in 20 years, a revenge thriller...
