Silent Night Reviews: Critics Sound Off on Dialogue-Free Action Movie
Here's what critics are saying about John Woo's Silent Night movie.
Critics are breaking their silence on Silent Night. The dialogue-free thriller from legendary action filmmaker John Woo (Face/Off, Mission: Impossible 2) and producer Basil Iwanyk (John Wick) follows voiceless vigilante Brian Godlock (The Suicide Squad's Joel Kinnaman), who wants only one thing for Christmas: revenge on the gang members who killed his son and left him with an injury that cost him his voice. Like the recent sci-fi horror No One Will Save You, there's few words of spoken dialogue in Silent Night — and while the R-rated revenge thriller isn't leaving critics speechless, early reactions seem to agree that this shoot-em-up is worth unwrapping.
"The whole movie is without dialogue," Woo told Vulture. "It allowed me to use visuals to tell the story, to tell how the character feels. We are using music instead of language. And the movie is all about sight and sound."
On Rotten Tomatoes, Silent Night currently sits at 75% "fresh" on the Tomatometer. Read excerpts from reviews around the internet below:
Silent Night Movie Reviews
Variety: "Silly as it might be, Silent Night gives audiences reason to get excited about the Hong Kong innovator once again, ranking as one of the few bloody Christmas counterprogrammers since Die Hard that feels worthy of repeat viewing down the road. Silent Night is not, as its title might suggest, a silent movie. Between all those bullets and Marco Beltrami's pulsating score, it's quite a noisy one, in fact. What Woo's return to American shores really represents is an extended stab at what Alfred Hitchcock called 'pure cinema': using the camera, editing and sound design — rather than dialogue — to tell the story."
The Hollywood Reporter: "Action fans will appreciate Woo's mastery, which is fully on display here in a series of car chases, shootouts and car chase/shootouts. Despite an obviously low budget, the kinetic sequences are superbly orchestrated and filmed, featuring the occasional doses of slow-motion that are the director's trademark... It's to Woo's and screenwriter Robert Lynn's credit, as well the fiercely commanding, intensely physical performance by Kinnaman, that the film's lack of dialogue proves not a gimmick but an asset."
Slant Magazine: "In far less accomplished hands, the film's near total lack of dialogue would seem like a cheap gimmick—a means of arriving at the next big set piece as quickly as possible. Here, Woo lingers on the relatively slower and more emotionally charged passages for far longer than one might expect given the setup ... When Silent Night does finally kick into high gear, the action is as artful as anything that Woo has whipped up throughout his storied career. Having a mute protagonist sheds a lot of the unnecessary fat that's become par for the course in big-budget studio fare over the years, and it allows Woo to home in on the things he excels at: kinetic, rhythmically beautiful hand-to-hand combat sequences; large-scale acts of vehicular fury; and knowing how to stage massive gunfights with a keen awareness for mapping out cinematic space."
Flickering Myth: "Silent Night is brutal and visceral, reminding us that John Woo can still stage one hell of an action set piece. Unfortunately, there isn't anything here narratively to make it worthwhile. Worse off, the editing here is a jumbled mess giving the impression that someone slapped these scenes together in 20 minutes when they had all the footage, with zero consideration of how any of it flowed or transitioned. Kid Cudi also plays a detective in a pointless role."
SF Chronicle: "It's all done in masterful style, with flourishes Woo brought to his Cantonese masterpieces (Hard Boiled, The Killer, A Better Tomorrow I and II) and his best Hollywood work (Broken Arrow, Face/Off, Mission: Impossible II). Lyrical slow motion counterposed with judicious, jittery edits, stunts beyond mortal ken, camera pans across time and birds (wild parrots as opposed to Woo's usual white doves) abound. What that technique enhances, though, can be disappointingly pedestrian. Silent Night is a full-on 1980s revenge flick with numbingly long training sequences, suiting-up for the big Christmas Eve massacre of expendable Latino gangbangers. It's Die Hard with a Death Wish. One clever touch is a reindeer sweater that jingles, made uglier by bloodstains."
Mashable: "Outside of its promising opening sequence, Silent Night takes its preposterous premise deadly seriously. And not even the carnage Woo offers can combat the tedium of this film's cliches. ... It's a hard ask for any leading man to carry an action movie with no lines. Kinnaman, while a serviceable actor in a slew of action-packed and dramatic offerings, doesn't have the kind of audience goodwill or powerful screen presence to shoulder all this without a word. He's dully intense and sad as he mourns and rages. He transforms his body to hard and ready for action over an overlong and brazenly cliched training montage."
IndieWire: "On paper, the prospect of John Woo trying his hand at Taken — or even Peppermint — might seem promising, as the vigilante sub-genre has suffered from extreme incompetence behind the camera since the moment Pierre Morel brought the whole thing back from life support (the best of these movies were shot with a lack of vision that makes them hard to watch, while the rest were shot with a dinginess that makes them hard to see). Yes, Silent Night is a ripoff of a ripoff that ultimately steals as much from John Wick as it does from Liam Neeson, but even that could be more of a feature than a bug in the hands of a filmmaker with a history of transforming the tropes of pulp fiction into the stuff of pop opera."
Silent Night, starring Joel Kinnaman, Scott Mescudi (Kid Cudi), Harold Torres, and Catalina Sandino Moreno, opens only in theaters December 1.
