Silent Night is a new action film directed by John Woo, director of Broken Arrow and Face/Off.
When a father (Joel Kinnaman) and his son accidentally become victims of a criminal gang shooting on Christmas Eve, the son is affected. The father goes after the criminals, but is also shot and his vocal cords are activated.
He can no longer talk, but he wants revenge. So he begins to train himself to take impossible Christmas revenge on the gang members who took his son and his voice away.
With Silent Night, John Woo makes a directorial comeback after 20 years, because he has no longer controlled American action films since his 2003 film Paycheck. John Woo has often made his private action films unique in special ways. He now tries to do the same again by using almost no real dialogue in this film, apart from some background dialogue from music and news radio.
Joel Kinnaman has to work more with facial expressions and body postures to act. He does this well, but if there had been a little more dialogue at the beginning of the film, the story could have been a bit clearer. Due to the lack of speech, the film can sometimes remain unclear. Catalina Sandino Moreno plays his wife and mother of the child who died. She knows how to portray a good, supporting role. Unfortunately, she fades into the background halfway through the film, during the father's revenge campaign. Kid Cudi plays a cop in the film who tries to investigate the attack on the father and son, but he still comes across as more in another film. If they had left his character out of the movie, the movie could have been a bit shorter and clearer.
The story remains a standard revenge action film, in which characters, for personal reasons, want to take revenge on people who have harmed or taken something away from them. This film is somewhat reminiscent of John Wick's Deadpool, only with less humor or similar action.
There are entertaining action scenes in this film, but unfortunately they are not that special and not at all for a Jon Woo action comeback. The action scenes do have some creative moments with good visual effects. Unfortunately, not all of the effects even look significant. Some explosions seem less realistic. The blood that characters get during the action scenes also sometimes looks more like fake CGI blood than it looks real.
