Silent Night

It's now around 20 years since legendary action director John Woo last tried his luck in Hollywood, which famously resulted in a succession of charming movies. Face/Off, Mission Impossible 2 and Broken Arrow just to name a few, before ending his US tour with the fantastically mediocre Paycheck in the mid-2000s and calling it a day. Snip, snip, snip - end of story, right?

No, not quite, and just in time for the season's festivities, Woo has prepared one of his customary patented, rock-hard bangers. Filled to the brim with everything that has come to define him over the years and become his traditional signature. Elaborate, bloody action mixed with soap opera-like script - equal parts Tre Kronor and Die Hard, straight into the blender, served and peppered with outrageously hard zooms.

It's a formula that's worked well for Woo, even if he's never managed to surpass his late-80s glory days with the seminal The Killer, A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled. A powerful legacy, and one that Silent Night, perhaps unsurprisingly, never even comes close to living up to, even if the director's classic hallmarks make themselves known from time to time.

Because, as in many of Woo's other films, revenge is a central theme with mute Brian Godlock, here portrayed by Joel Kinnaman, setting out to find the gangsters who killed his son, and it never gets more complex than that. For better or worse, what follows - like what we've already been served fifty eleven thousand times - is violence, explosions and absurd amounts of bang-bang.

In other words, nothing new under the sun if you're already familiar with Woo, or the recent wave of gun-fu flicks. Whether this is a positive or a negative depends on how tired you are of the genre, and it's not like Silent Night brings much new to the table. All that is served up here are variations or copies of scenes you have most likely already seen before.

Unfortunately, it is not only the content of Silent Night that stinks of recycled compost material, but also the execution. Woo, normally known for his stylish action scenes, is strangely dull and grey here. With a camera that rushes around and is never allowed to linger on the violence. It feels cheap and tidy in a way that simply doesn't marry very well with what (I suspect) Woo really wants to achieve with Silent Night.

But the biggest of cardinal sins here is the fact that Kinnaman's silent role is never really utilised for anything special and the character is thus reduced to just another of the many silent avengers we've already seen in hundreds of other films - a stylistic choice. Reasonable then that even the title is something that has already been used in a plethora of other films over the years, and thus only contributes even more to the identity-free mess that Silent Night unfortunately represents.

Any hope that this would somehow be a new renaissance for John Woo is thus dashed. This is not the long-awaited comeback from the director that we all secretly hoped for, and Silent Night never manages to reach even the lowest of levels from Woo's last turn in Hollywood. Because this is just bad, a tired copy destined for the nearest mid-term re-release.

Do yourself a favour and skip Silent Night. It's the Christmas present that no one asked for and it's a genuine clunker that stinks from start to finish, completely devoid of any kind of artistic identity and with an absolutely dreadful "script." This is the Eldorado equivalent of John Wick, destined for the nearest bargain bin.