Violent Night hits theaters on December 2, 2022.
It’s the month before Christmas that brings Violent Night, a loud skull crusher that packs a punch. Director Tommy Wirkola honors Die Hard and Home Alone with care, hoping that a barbaric Santa would; just kidding, the rhymes stop there. There’s no reason to distract me from my enthusiasm for a burst of Hallmark holiday traditions and gore fight sequences from the filmmaker behind Dead Snows and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. Violent Night sells its gingerbread-scented hostage scenario with the sass of winter wonderland innocence, and then old Saint Nick goes warrior-crazy with a hammer.
David Harbor is apparently having a great time as Santa Claus, currently suffering a crisis of faith due to civilization’s increasingly mischievous habits. Another year of flying around the world, giving away electronics for naughty children that will be obsolete in weeks – Santa’s Christmas spirit is fading. Your next stop? The Lightstone residential complex where matriarch Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo) once again welcomes her son Jason (Alex Hassell), daughter Alva (Edi Patterson), the accompanying family and all the hired catering help. Santa bursts into homemade cookies and vibrates in a luxury massage chair, living the good life until he hears gunshots. Enter John Leguizamo as a Christmas-hating criminal (“Mr. Scrooge,” he calls himself) on the hunt for Gertrude’s millions of vaults, firing his gun and threatening even Jason’s young daughter, Trudy (Leah Brady), which Santa doesn’t approve of.
Violent Night darkens your average coal-waste syndicated Christmas drama by presenting the Lightstones as dysfunctional elites who have lost their joy in their holly. Alva is a foul-mouthed alcoholic, her husband Morgan (Cam Gigandet) is a D-list action star in search of producers, and Gertrude’s introduction includes metaphorically roasting the chestnuts of an unrepentant senator. Violent Night takes Michael Dougherty’s Krampus approach of teaching wholesome holiday lessons with heavy doses of danger, except Violent Night trades in hideous creatures for mutilated minions within reach of Santa Claus. There are no attached monsters, just purring snow plow blades, icicles and sharpened ice skates as Santa’s makeshift arsenal.
Harbor’s transformation into a grizzled, tattooed Santa shows an actor loving every second on screen.
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Pat Casey and Josh Miller’s script is aggressively on the nose, calling out influences and narrative beats like Rudolph pointing to his flashing red schnoz. The scenes don’t just blatantly recreate Home Alone: ​​characters will say out loud how much a sequence resembles Home Alone. Violent Night lives to entertain by turning famous Christmas carols into Santa catchphrases during battle or bastardizing Trudy’s Christmas innocence. The script can read as cheesy at first, as the momentum takes a few beats to start snowballing, but then the beheadings begin and Wirkola’s brutal sensibility results in the beatdowns of primetime seasons.
Harbor’s transformation into a grizzled, tattooed Santa shows an actor loving every second on screen. Santa isn’t invincible, nor are the choreographed fight sequences over the top. Harbor sports his red leather suit with a redwood heft, using everything from electrified stars to glittering garlands to his advantage against the psychopaths hired by Scrooge (each with cute seasonal codenames like Frosty and Jingle) . It’s the John McClaneisms like lying quietly exhausted next to dead bodies or laughing heartily as soldiers explode after he stuffs a grenade into his “stocking”. Beverly D’Angelo, Cam Gigandet and the rest play off established stereotypes, while Harbor reinvents Santa as a brawny action hero with nothing but nose magic, an endless sack of toys, and a legible scroll of enemy names “naughty”. The reset is all Harbor that translates beautiful holiday images into harsh mercenary punishments.
With a faster opening, Violent Night would have reached a higher rung. When Harbor is off camera, there’s less to get excited about. Leguizamo can easily pull off the bah-humbug bullet storm character, but not all of his supporting villains have the same presence. Harbor is Violent Night’s not-so-secret weapon, which becomes apparent when Wirkola stages a game-changing fight sequence with another Christmas radio hit that ramps up the intensity and sets a new standard going forward. That’s when Violent Night kicks into overdrive, when gory news breaks and the naughtiest have no mercy, just as 1989’s Deadly Games goes from a “fun” Christmas thriller to a suspenseful war of December
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