Be good, for goodness sake!
The most obvious way to sum up Violent Night - and when I say "most obvious", I mean "so obvious that the film itself does so, explicitly" - is that it combines modern cinema's two foremost Christmas classics that aren't really in any significant way about Christmas, 1988's Die Hard and 1990's Home Alone, and then proceeds to Christmas the bejeezus out of them. Both of those films are mentioned by name, and specific plot beats are borrowed from both, and there's an entire scene whose more or less solitary function can be described as "remaking Home Alone only we're going to acknowledge - in fact, we're going to emphasise - that the cute kid-friendly slapstick shenanigans in that movie would in fact have left all three of the main characters horribly mangled and probably dead".
The extra dollop of Christmas comes because this film's partial stand in for the Bruce Willis character in Die Hard is none other than Santa Claus himself, a right crotchety old elf played as a drunken cynic by a superb David Harbour. This particular Christmas Eve, Santa has had it up to here with the greed and commercialism that have rotted the season down to its core, down to the very children themselves. Basically, he's Charlie Brown in A Charlie Brown Christmas, only without a Linus to calmly read to him from the New Testament, Saint Nick has decided to bury his cynical rage in floating haze of alcohol. Meanwhile, twilight is approaching in Connecticut, where one of the most awful super-rich families you have ever encountered is gathering to celebrate its miserable, caustic holiday. The absolutely revolting matriarch Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D'Angelo) is putting on a ridiculously indulgent, icily tasteful display where the serving staff seems to outnumber the actual family members: Gertrude's craven daughter Alva (Edi Patterson) has come with her appalling social media influencer son Bert (Alexander Elliot), and her airhead current paramour, Morgan Steele (Cam Gigandet), a hacky action movie star. Gertrude's son Jason (Alex Hassell) is by far more pleasant company than any of his relatives, but he's still a bit of a crumb, to judge from the fact that this holiday represents the extremely tense and unhappy détente in his acrimonious separation from his wife Linda (Alexis Louder), who can't deal with how mealy-mouthed and pathetic he is in kowtowing to his wretched mother. The only reason Linda has agreed to see him this day at all is for the sake of their daughter, Trudy (Leah Brady), and also because if there's not an angry marital spat going on, what kind of Die Hard riff would this be, anyways?
Speaking of which, the real Die Hard action comes after a fairly grim first act, which introduces the Lightstones with far more care and detail than we perhaps need, given how intolerably poor company they are. It's only after sundown that the seemingly terrible catering staff is revealed to be a cabal of thieves, come to steal the massive fortune hiding in the Lightstone vault, all with an impeccable plan laid out by a Christmas-hating mastermind who has adopted, for this job, the nickname "Mr. Scrooge" (John Leguizamo). He has a preternaturally good understanding not only of the layout of the house, what's inside of it, and how to manipulate the toxic family dynamics to his own ends, he's also fully familiar with all of Gertrude's back-up plans for any such occurrence as a home break-in, including how he plans to neutralise her private army of ex-military bodyguards. The only thing that could possibly throw his plans off is if there was a person on the grounds who he hadn't accounted for; a person, for example, who has access to Christmas magic, and more importantly, was a violent Norse warrior in his life before becoming an immortal demigod. As it so happens, Santa is sleeping one off in one of the many rooms in the Lightstone mansion, and once the sound of gunshots scares off reindeer and sleigh, he's got nothing to do with the rest of his Christmas Eve besides kill the godalmighty fuck out of the grinches who've decided to ruin the holiday. And if in the process, a small, beatific child who still believes in the true spirit of giving should reignite Santa's belief in himself and Christmas, while also doing the same for her dysfunctional family, well, Violent Night turns out to actually be a much more earnest Christmas movie than I would have anticipated.
If all that sounds like a lot of moving pieces for a film that could be described, from a distance, as "Santa beats robbers on the Naughty List to death": yes it is, and that's sort of a problem. It's very easy to point to the main strengths of Violent Night: Harbour, Leguizamo, and the action choreography put together by the good folks at 87North Productions (the successor company to 87Eleven, which was responsible for the John Wicks). Accordingly, it's easy to point to the things that aren't strengths: absolutely everything to do with every Lightstone other than Trudy, who does, to the filmmakers' credit, capably anchor the part of the movie that's a sincere look at how the Magic of Christmas Brings Us Together. Brady's performance isn't one for the child acting Hall of Fame, but she does sugar-sweet innocence and wide-eyed wonder well, and the movie makes very good use of this e.g. when she's staging some Home Alone gags whose bloody brutality are crosscut with Trudy's joyous Christmassy energy for maximum dark humor. Mostly, though the family is desperately unengaging company: Linda and Jason are given precisely the amount of definition necessary to set up the inevitable arc of their plot, and not a shred more, and the others are an ungodly tedious collection of unpleasant tics, played broadly, and ripped off without any meaningful skill from Knives Out. We spend too much time wallowing in their company - at 112 minutes, Violent Night hasn't made hard enough decisions about what to keep - and while it's extremely frontloaded, that just means that it's kind of an antsy sit getting to the good stuff.
I have to be honest, though, the good stuff is pretty damn good. Harbour's growling, draggletail Santa is a wonderful display of caustic sarcasm played at exactly the right level of exaggeration; I would sincerely call the it the best performance I've seen him give in a movie, light enough that we never fail to read this as the tongue-in-cheek goof that it's clearly meant to be, but based in the character's irritable reality such that it never feels trivial. And his "ho ho ho" is absolutely superb, in part because it always sneaks up on us. He interacts with the rest of the cast disappointingly infrequently, and with Leguizamo's campy, melodramatic Scrooge barely at all, which is too bad; their two performances are well-balanced, and Leguizamo's entrance represents a huge jump up in the film's energy (he comes in only after the exposition is all done and the violence has begun, and it "makes sense" from a storytelling perspective, but still, the movie could do with him sooner), and the contrasting hamminess of the two actors is very much the best thing Violent Night has to offer.
Better, even, than the violence, which is in some ways a bit lower key than the best of 87North's offerings (there's nothing close to the pure brutal poetry of the bus fight from Nobody, for example), but gains a lot of charm from its incorporation of just about every kind of Christmas gewgaw and doodad you can imagine: ornaments, lights, outdoor Nativity displays, parcels wrapped in bright paper. A snowblower is given such pride of place early in establishing a certain location that it makes the subsequent setpiece (the film's action highlight) even more exciting by making us wait and wait for that snowblower to get turned on, rather like the way you can't fall asleep the night of December 24 wondering what presents will be under the tree in the morning. Only with the childish innocence replaced by bloodlust.
This is all very solid stuff, handled by director Tommy Wirkola with a decent amount of dark comic flair that compensates for his generally workmanlike handling of the action: it's a film whose fights are choreographed much better than they're shot and edited. It's a very peppy movie, if not always exactly "light", certainly always fun: the upside to having so few people we like is that it's not very likely that we're ever going to see one of our favorites get injured (the one time a "nice" character gets seriously harmed, it magically disappears over the course of a cut. This works more than it doesn't, and it's given an additional boost by Dominic Lewis's score, which converts a great many Christmas carols into pointedly generic action music, and while it's only really the one joke, repeated multiple times, it's a joke that I think largely works. The whole of Violent Night is, after all, basically just one joke, repeated multiple time: "Santa fucks dudes up". If that joke sound terrible to you, I can't imagine anything here changing your mind; if it sounds questionable, I would like to confirm that it sounded a little questionable to me also, and Violent Night is awfully close to being the best possible version of it. If, meanwhile, all you want is a Christmas movie that has a nice, upbeat attitude, clear-cut morality, and nice things happening to the good and sweet people we like from the moment we meet them, I am shocked to report that Violent Night provides exactly that. It has a ton of heart, even when that heart is being pounded into mincemeat by a sledgehammer.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
The extra dollop of Christmas comes because this film's partial stand in for the Bruce Willis character in Die Hard is none other than Santa Claus himself, a right crotchety old elf played as a drunken cynic by a superb David Harbour. This particular Christmas Eve, Santa has had it up to here with the greed and commercialism that have rotted the season down to its core, down to the very children themselves. Basically, he's Charlie Brown in A Charlie Brown Christmas, only without a Linus to calmly read to him from the New Testament, Saint Nick has decided to bury his cynical rage in floating haze of alcohol. Meanwhile, twilight is approaching in Connecticut, where one of the most awful super-rich families you have ever encountered is gathering to celebrate its miserable, caustic holiday. The absolutely revolting matriarch Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D'Angelo) is putting on a ridiculously indulgent, icily tasteful display where the serving staff seems to outnumber the actual family members: Gertrude's craven daughter Alva (Edi Patterson) has come with her appalling social media influencer son Bert (Alexander Elliot), and her airhead current paramour, Morgan Steele (Cam Gigandet), a hacky action movie star. Gertrude's son Jason (Alex Hassell) is by far more pleasant company than any of his relatives, but he's still a bit of a crumb, to judge from the fact that this holiday represents the extremely tense and unhappy détente in his acrimonious separation from his wife Linda (Alexis Louder), who can't deal with how mealy-mouthed and pathetic he is in kowtowing to his wretched mother. The only reason Linda has agreed to see him this day at all is for the sake of their daughter, Trudy (Leah Brady), and also because if there's not an angry marital spat going on, what kind of Die Hard riff would this be, anyways?
Speaking of which, the real Die Hard action comes after a fairly grim first act, which introduces the Lightstones with far more care and detail than we perhaps need, given how intolerably poor company they are. It's only after sundown that the seemingly terrible catering staff is revealed to be a cabal of thieves, come to steal the massive fortune hiding in the Lightstone vault, all with an impeccable plan laid out by a Christmas-hating mastermind who has adopted, for this job, the nickname "Mr. Scrooge" (John Leguizamo). He has a preternaturally good understanding not only of the layout of the house, what's inside of it, and how to manipulate the toxic family dynamics to his own ends, he's also fully familiar with all of Gertrude's back-up plans for any such occurrence as a home break-in, including how he plans to neutralise her private army of ex-military bodyguards. The only thing that could possibly throw his plans off is if there was a person on the grounds who he hadn't accounted for; a person, for example, who has access to Christmas magic, and more importantly, was a violent Norse warrior in his life before becoming an immortal demigod. As it so happens, Santa is sleeping one off in one of the many rooms in the Lightstone mansion, and once the sound of gunshots scares off reindeer and sleigh, he's got nothing to do with the rest of his Christmas Eve besides kill the godalmighty fuck out of the grinches who've decided to ruin the holiday. And if in the process, a small, beatific child who still believes in the true spirit of giving should reignite Santa's belief in himself and Christmas, while also doing the same for her dysfunctional family, well, Violent Night turns out to actually be a much more earnest Christmas movie than I would have anticipated.
If all that sounds like a lot of moving pieces for a film that could be described, from a distance, as "Santa beats robbers on the Naughty List to death": yes it is, and that's sort of a problem. It's very easy to point to the main strengths of Violent Night: Harbour, Leguizamo, and the action choreography put together by the good folks at 87North Productions (the successor company to 87Eleven, which was responsible for the John Wicks). Accordingly, it's easy to point to the things that aren't strengths: absolutely everything to do with every Lightstone other than Trudy, who does, to the filmmakers' credit, capably anchor the part of the movie that's a sincere look at how the Magic of Christmas Brings Us Together. Brady's performance isn't one for the child acting Hall of Fame, but she does sugar-sweet innocence and wide-eyed wonder well, and the movie makes very good use of this e.g. when she's staging some Home Alone gags whose bloody brutality are crosscut with Trudy's joyous Christmassy energy for maximum dark humor. Mostly, though the family is desperately unengaging company: Linda and Jason are given precisely the amount of definition necessary to set up the inevitable arc of their plot, and not a shred more, and the others are an ungodly tedious collection of unpleasant tics, played broadly, and ripped off without any meaningful skill from Knives Out. We spend too much time wallowing in their company - at 112 minutes, Violent Night hasn't made hard enough decisions about what to keep - and while it's extremely frontloaded, that just means that it's kind of an antsy sit getting to the good stuff.
I have to be honest, though, the good stuff is pretty damn good. Harbour's growling, draggletail Santa is a wonderful display of caustic sarcasm played at exactly the right level of exaggeration; I would sincerely call the it the best performance I've seen him give in a movie, light enough that we never fail to read this as the tongue-in-cheek goof that it's clearly meant to be, but based in the character's irritable reality such that it never feels trivial. And his "ho ho ho" is absolutely superb, in part because it always sneaks up on us. He interacts with the rest of the cast disappointingly infrequently, and with Leguizamo's campy, melodramatic Scrooge barely at all, which is too bad; their two performances are well-balanced, and Leguizamo's entrance represents a huge jump up in the film's energy (he comes in only after the exposition is all done and the violence has begun, and it "makes sense" from a storytelling perspective, but still, the movie could do with him sooner), and the contrasting hamminess of the two actors is very much the best thing Violent Night has to offer.
Better, even, than the violence, which is in some ways a bit lower key than the best of 87North's offerings (there's nothing close to the pure brutal poetry of the bus fight from Nobody, for example), but gains a lot of charm from its incorporation of just about every kind of Christmas gewgaw and doodad you can imagine: ornaments, lights, outdoor Nativity displays, parcels wrapped in bright paper. A snowblower is given such pride of place early in establishing a certain location that it makes the subsequent setpiece (the film's action highlight) even more exciting by making us wait and wait for that snowblower to get turned on, rather like the way you can't fall asleep the night of December 24 wondering what presents will be under the tree in the morning. Only with the childish innocence replaced by bloodlust.
This is all very solid stuff, handled by director Tommy Wirkola with a decent amount of dark comic flair that compensates for his generally workmanlike handling of the action: it's a film whose fights are choreographed much better than they're shot and edited. It's a very peppy movie, if not always exactly "light", certainly always fun: the upside to having so few people we like is that it's not very likely that we're ever going to see one of our favorites get injured (the one time a "nice" character gets seriously harmed, it magically disappears over the course of a cut. This works more than it doesn't, and it's given an additional boost by Dominic Lewis's score, which converts a great many Christmas carols into pointedly generic action music, and while it's only really the one joke, repeated multiple times, it's a joke that I think largely works. The whole of Violent Night is, after all, basically just one joke, repeated multiple time: "Santa fucks dudes up". If that joke sound terrible to you, I can't imagine anything here changing your mind; if it sounds questionable, I would like to confirm that it sounded a little questionable to me also, and Violent Night is awfully close to being the best possible version of it. If, meanwhile, all you want is a Christmas movie that has a nice, upbeat attitude, clear-cut morality, and nice things happening to the good and sweet people we like from the moment we meet them, I am shocked to report that Violent Night provides exactly that. It has a ton of heart, even when that heart is being pounded into mincemeat by a sledgehammer.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: action, comedies, tis the season, violence and gore
