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.
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“The whole movie is without dialogue,” Woo told Vulture.”It allowed me to use visuals to tell the story, to tell how thecharacter feels. We are using music instead of language. And the movieis 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 getexcited about the Hong Kong innovator once again, ranking as one of thefew bloody Christmas counterprogrammers since Die Hard that feelsworthy 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’squite a noisy one, in fact. What Woo’s return to American shores reallyrepresents is an extended stab at what Alfred Hitchcock called ‘purecinema’: using the camera, editing and sound design — rather thandialogue — to tell the story.”
The Hollywood Reporter: “Action fans will appreciate Woo’s mastery, which is fully on displayhere in a series of car chases, shootouts and car chase/shootouts.Despite an obviously low budget, the kinetic sequences are superblyorchestrated and filmed, featuring the occasional doses of slow-motionthat 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 dialoguewould seem like a cheap gimmick—a means of arriving at the next big setpiece as quickly as possible. Here, Woo lingers on the relatively slowerand more emotionally charged passages for far longer than one mightexpect given the setup … When Silent Night does finally kick into high gear, theaction is as artful as anything that Woo has whipped up throughout hisstoried career. Having a mute protagonist sheds a lot of the unnecessaryfat that’s become par for the course in big-budget studio fare over theyears, 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 massivegunfights with a keen awareness for mapping out cinematic space.”
Flickering Myth: “Silent Night is brutal and visceral, reminding us thatJohn Woo can still stage one hell of an action set piece.Unfortunately, there isn’t anything here narratively to make itworthwhile. Worse off, the editing here is a jumbled mess giving theimpression that someone slapped these scenes together in 20 minutes whenthey had all the footage, with zero consideration of how any of itflowed or transitioned. Kid Cudi also plays a detective in a pointlessrole.”
SF Chronicle: “It’s all done in masterful style, with flourishes Woo brought to hisCantonese masterpieces (Hard Boiled, The Killer, A Better TomorrowI and II) and his best Hollywood work (Broken Arrow, Face/Off, Mission: Impossible II). Lyrical slow motion counterposed withjudicious, jittery edits, stunts beyond mortal ken, camera pans acrosstime and birds (wild parrots as opposed to Woo’s usual white doves)abound. What that technique enhances, though, can bedisappointingly pedestrian. Silent Night is a full-on 1980s revengeflick with numbingly long training sequences, suiting-up for the bigChristmas Eve massacre of expendable Latino gangbangers. It’s Die Hardwith a Death Wish. One clever touch is a reindeer sweater thatjingles, made uglier by bloodstains.”
Mashable: “Outside of its promising opening sequence, Silent Night takesits preposterous premise deadly seriously. And not even the carnage Woooffers can combat the tedium of this film’s cliches. … It’s a hard ask for any leading man to carry an action movie with nolines. Kinnaman, while a serviceable actor in a slew of action-packedand dramatic offerings, doesn’t have the kind of audience goodwill orpowerful screen presence to shoulder all this without a word. He’sdully intense and sad as he mourns and rages. He transforms his body tohard and ready for action over an overlong and brazenly clichedtraining 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 fromextreme incompetence behind the camera since the moment Pierre Morelbrought the whole thing back from life support (the best of these movieswere shot with a lack of vision that makes them hard to watch, whilethe 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 muchfrom John Wick as it does from Liam Neeson, but even that could be moreof a feature than a bug in the hands of a filmmaker with a history oftransforming 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.
