The movie “Silent Night” should have been more silent

Ok so I’m maybe 25 minutes into this movie, right? And here’s what’s happened so far: A guy’s kid was killed by a random act of gang violence. He loves his son. He chases them down in a misguided attempt to get revenge and gets shot in the throat. He misses his son. His wife helps him mend, even though he can no longer speak, and he’s also a selfish prick who’s handling his emotions badly. He loves his son.

Sure, the direction of the film is great, and its gimmick of not having any dialogue so far is also fine. I had a pretty good time of it in No One Will Save You. The sans-dialogue trick is fine, because director John Woo is pretty good at the “show, don’t tell” thing, but honestly, we do not need 30 minutes of protagonist Joel Kinnaman being depressed, because I fucking get it. Then two characters pull out their phones to communicate while standing 10 feet apart, and my exact thoughts were ‘oh. We’re doing texting now.’

I don’t know if I want to continue the movie. On one hand, I’m bored. On the other hand, I’m a completionist- and now I’ve got half a movie and half a review. We’ll see how it goes.

Ok I did it.

You know what kind of movie can never pass the Bechdel Test? A movie with no dialogue. Also, a movie where the lead female character spends her entire runtime crying.

Right, so the no-dialogue gimmick is the crux of this film, because director John Woo said to himself and us that ‘hey. It’s a revenge gunfest movie. What more is there to say, y’know?’ So we skipped the fluff, and that’s fine and all, except where he saved us some cliches, he instead filled the rest of the movie- and I mean filled the rest of the movie- with really sappy, corny, sad violin, sunflare-speckled, melodramatic, ‘this guy really, really loved his son’ flashbacks. I swear, there’s more ‘woe is me’ than actual action in this movie.

If I had to recommend this movie to my uncle, who lives and breathes gunfight action films, I’d tell him to just skip to the last 45 minutes of this 1:30 minute film. Like, skip the entire first half, because there’s nothing of interest in the first half. And that’s a shame, y’know? Cause when the action is good, it’s great. It’s like Atomic Blonde and John Wick and The Night Comes for Us and The Raid if social tensions were swapped out with ‘white man kills a bunch of Mexicans’.

After a string of YMMV-rated films, I’m almost glad to say that Silent Night was

BAD

I watched Silent Night as my third straight movie on a 10 hour flight, but you can watch it on AppleTV or Starz.

Wondering how my rating system works? Let me explain!