Silent Night: John Woo back to Hollywood with old-fashioned action thriller - South China Morning Post

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3/5 stars

It’s been 20 years since Paycheck, the last Hollywood film by Hong Kong director John Woo Yu-sum.

Touted as his US comeback, Silent Night is more a repackaging of his greatest hits. Fans will appreciate the action in this bloody revenge drama, even while acknowledging the steep drop-off from classics like The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled (1992).

Joel Kinnaman (Rick Flag in the Suicide Squad films) plays Brian Godlock, a grieving father whose young son is killed in gang violence. It takes a year for Godlock to recover from his own wounds and plot his revenge. “Kill them all,” he writes on his calendar for December 24.

Godlock has a lot to learn. Training, YouTube how-to videos and determination get him only so far. Initial efforts to track down gang leader Playa (Harold Torres) leave him bruised and breathless; cops like Detective Vassell (Scott Mescudi) only get in the way.

Eventually Godlock finds enough clues and kills enough enemies to make his way to an abandoned warehouse, where Playa has surrounded himself with an army of mercenaries and killers.

How filming Hard Target taught John Woo some hard lessons about Hollywood

The gimmick in Silent Night is the almost complete absence of dialogue. Apart from TV and radio snippets, texts and song lyrics do all the communicating here. Robert Archer Lynn’s screenplay is so elemental that the story is always easy to follow.

Forty years ago, Woo helped set the standard for blood-soaked action. But in a market saturated by franchises like Taken, The Raid and John Wick, Silent Night feels slow and old-fashioned – almost irrelevant.

The director remains a master of camera movement, building suspense from simple situations that escalate into chaos. Every now and then a stunt sequence will provoke gasps, as when Godlock kicks a bad guy through a glass banister down two flights of stairs.

Joel Kinnaman in a still from “Silent Night”. Photo: Carlos Latapi/Lionsgate.

A two-person fight in a garage is breathtaking, thanks in part to work by supervising stunt coordinator James M. Churchman and stunt coordinator Bernardo Bucio.

Woo reins in the directorial flourishes: no doves, few candles, no bromances, limited slow-motion dancing. That may be due to producer Basil Iwanyk, best known for his work on John Wick.

Silent Night is arguably a step up from Woo’s Japan-based 2017 film Manhunt, but it still lacks the precision and manic energy of his best work.

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Silent Night: John Woo back to Hollywood with old-fashioned action thriller - South China Morning Post
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