Merry Christmas, everyone! Let’s talk about a murdered child and how it leads to a blood-soaked rampage.

Seventy-seven year old John Woo is back in American theaters! It feels like it’s been forever since I have thought of the master of doves, but he presents the new Christmas-themed action movie, Silent Night. It’s his first movie in over 6 years, with his last being 2017’s Manhunt!

Silent Night stars Joel Kinnamen (of the Suicide Squad flicks) as Brian, a husband and father whose seven year old son is gunned down by a stray bullet from the rampage left in the wake of two gangs’ cars shooting at each other. With his son dead, the movie actually opens with Brian unconsciously springing into action to chase down the men responsible.

He ends up getting a few of them, but is soon taken down by Playa, a high-ranking member of one of the gangs. Playa shoots Brian in the throat and leaves him for dead.

But he does not die! Brian is rushed to a local medical facility where his life is saved, and he is put back together. After what appears to be–and what HAS to have been–several weeks of recovery, we learn that Brian has lost the ability to speak thanks to that bullet into his neck.

This sets up the gimmick upon which the movie is framed: It’s not just Brian who doesn’t speak; there is virtually no spoken dialogue throughout the entire film.

In the wake of his return from the hospital, the reality of his new life without his son hits Brian. He spends the months following his recovery in a drunken stupor and drifting further and further from his also-grieving wife. From January through April, Brian is drifting without purpose until he is reminded of the men who murdered his child. He then makes it his mission to kill them all… on Christmas Eve, one year to the day after they took his son from him.

From there we get the still-physically-recovering Brian’s eight month transformation into the friggin’ Punisher. He buys a Mustang and armors it up. He learns to shoot. He gets jacked. And… he loses his wife when she walks out on him. He remains undeterred in his new quest, however, and Christmas Eve fast approaches…

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+Joel Kinnamen tries to break the John Wickian formula a bit here by showing us a hero who is not entirely comfortable with his own actions. At various times during Brian’s rampage, he displays fear, hesitancy, disgust, remorse, and flat-out incompetency. And Kinnamen is doing it all with his face–mostly his eyes.

These are not emotions we see very often in these Wick clone movies–and I feel like I’ve seen an absolute ton of them lately–but we do get them from the star of this show.

+The movie commits to its shtick hard, and I give it credit for that. There isn’t exactly NO dialogue across the 100+ minute runtime, but there is very little. The movie cheats at points by using tricks like text messages, cards, notes, and the like, but that’s all sparingly used just to further some plot.

-At the point of having watched as many John Wick clones as I have as of late, I really want to see something a little more subversive. The “No Dialogue” gimmick is fine for a little change-up, but ultimately, we are getting the same movie we’ve seen several times in the last few years. Just without spoken words.

There are moments with Brian and his wife Saya where I really wanted to ultimate story to be Brian eschewing his revenge to, instead, make things right with her and repair what they had to have once had before their son died. But the movie just… lets them separate so he could engage in his mission. I know I’m basically asking for a different movie than what Woo wanted to make, but… that’s what I wanted to see. Something with more heart and substance than a whole third act of “Gang-Banger Go Boom”.

-The most frustrating aspect of the movie comes in the third act where Brian decides to start a gang war as part of his plan.

A gang war.

From the character whose motivation is that his son was killed by a stray bullet in the previous year’s… *checks notes*… ah yes, the previous year’s gang battle.

And his gang war he starts sees an innocent cop get killed in the crossfire! So whatever sympathy I had for Brian was lost with this decision. In addition the the cop, how many other lives were lost in his gang war? Come on, man!

The point may be that Brian is singularly-minded to a huge fault and is ultimately not supposed to be sympathetic. Fair enough: both of the Downs here play towards that. But the movie never pays those point off, and frankly, that idea feels smarter than much else going on here. Though I could be wrong!

OVERALL

It felt a little too married to its gimmick to do anything more exciting or original storyline-wise, and that reminds me of what disappointed me about No One Will Save You. It really does feel like Kinnamen is trying to add a bit of humanity to the movie, but it just can’t override everything else going on. This is where I think the John Wick formula is officially getting tiresome.

★★ out of 5