Hong Kong action maestro and Silent Night director John Woo has been so influential (would John Wick exist without him?), and remains so well-loved by film geeks (has anyone a cross word for Face/Off?), that it’s easy to forget that he hasn’t made an American movie in 20 years. There are plenty of Hong Kong directors who dabbled in Hollywood and found the experience disheartening (or perhaps simply not that interesting), but Woo seemed to be primed for a major U.S. phase of his career following the commercial and critical success of 1997’s Face/Off and the summer-conquering box office of Mission: Impossible II in 2000. A few movies later, Woo’s U.S. days were over—and now, two decades later, he’s back in with Silent Night. It’s something of a throwback, though maybe not in the way you might expect.
Silent Night arrives just before the 20-year anniversary of Woo’s negligibly regarded Ben Affleck sci-fi thriller Paycheck and not long after the 30-year anniversary of Hard Target, his first studio film. The decade Woo spent doing American movies is remembered largely for his work with American movie stars: John Travolta in Broken Arrow and Face/Off, Nicolas Cage in Face/Off and Windtalkers, Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, all capable of summoning intensity to fit the florid, melodramatic, sometimes wickedly funny style Woo favors. Silent Night instead recalls the bookends of his U.S. decade—it’s a stylized B-movie in the vein of both Hard Target and Paycheck.
It should be a comfortable mode for Woo—a way to play around with studio toys while avoiding the studio interference that comes along with bigger budgets. (Broken Arrow, for example, feels watered-down compared to the likes of Hong Kong-era Woo films like Hard Boiled and The Killer, which in turn made his follow-up Face/Off feel even more like Woo was getting away with something.) In 2023, it also offers a chance to do something smaller after making multiple two-part epics (Red Cliff and The Crossing) in China.
Yet so far, Budget Woo often results in fun movies that feel somehow off. Silent Night arrives loaded with mercenary gimmicks: It’s sort of a John Wick ripoff, featuring a man prone to violence seeking revenge for the death of a loved one, with a dash of later-period Liam Neeson action-anguish; it’s set on and between two successive Christmas holidays (a tragedy kicks off the first one, and then the aggrieved party spends a full year preparing to smite his enemies, with 12/24 marked “kill them all” in his calendar); and, to top it off, it’s effectively dialogue-free. The movie is almost too crowded with loglines to give its director the space to go full Woo.
That’s not to say he doesn’t try. From the first glimpse of its unnamed protagonist, played by Joel Kinnaman, Silent Night is chockablock with slow motion, ultraviolence, blazing guns, vehicular combat, and images memorably framed as distorted reflections. It’s also a novel kick to watch a dude essentially training to be the hero of a Woo action movie, which is what happens in the middle section of Silent Night.
At the same time, Woo strips the material down enough to avoid the hallmarks that might now read as self-parody. There are no doves and/or pigeons flapping through the frame, no characters pointing guns straight at each other as if regarding themselves in a mirror. This is a nasty revenge picture which opens with the death of a child, and—despite some obligatory ruminations on the costs of vengeance—shows little regard for the dozens of supposed gang members and drug dealers, mostly nonwhite, who must get killed in an attempt to make things right. (With one supporting character, it also extends a vicious lack of sympathy to drug users.) I haven’t seen nearly all of Woo’s Hong Kong films, but he’s never made an American movie this reactionary, as if he’s been informed that he should only really try to imitate the worst elements of Neeson’s action vehicles (and, hey, the Taken movies are Neeson’s most popular).
It's the sort-of-silence gambit that gives the movie its best potential out on the right-wing-fantasy stuff; without dialogue providing the opportunity to justify that stuff or explain it away, the movie is forced into a kind of deranged honesty. Technically, the movie isn’t completely dialogue-free, with occasional radio chatter, plus some murmurs and muttering; you don’t feel the story straining to keep every character quiet, as in the recent thriller No One Will Save You. Instead, Silent Night takes its cues from Kinnaman’s character, whose bullet-to-the-neck injury turns his grief into strangled cries. Later, it’s drowned out by a hail of bullets and a litany of gnarly kills.
The movie certainly goes harder than Paycheck, Woo’s previous foray into guy-with-a-deadline B-cinema. That film has a bad reputation, and perhaps deservedly so; as a Philip K. Dick adaptation, it’s no Blade Runner, Minority Report, or Total Recall. (It’s not even the Adjustment Bureau, starring Ben Affleck’s lifelong pal Matt Damon.) There is, however, a certain level of craft that stands out 20 years later. Like this year’s Hypnotic, an ill-regarded Affleck vehicle from part-time action stylist Robert Rodriguez, the mere fact that it vaguely resembles some ’40s noir and Hitchcock thrillers should have a certain type of movie geek greedily eating up the scraps it offers.
Woo seemed decidedly less ravenous, though; he may not have been the guy for a story about a machine that can see into the future, given that he had Face/Off rewritten to make it contemporary rather than future-set. Despite a lack of futuristic environments, Paycheck's premise is arguably wilder than the earlier movie’s advanced face-switching tech: Affleck plays an engineer whose work requires extensive memory wipes, leading him to invent a machine that can show people the future, and then abdicate payment for it for reasons his future self must then decipher. The mind-bendy aspects of the movie don’t have much to do with the occasional motorcycle chases or scenes of Affleck in stick-wielding combat (something audiences somehow resisted in the year of Daredevil), and the movie’s sci-fi and action material never meshes together. It’s all made with an entertaining polish but directed with palpable disengagement, as if Woo checked out mentally when he realized how little grandeur was on the table.
This leaves Hard Target as the best of Woo’s three smaller-scale American actioners, despite the fact that he doesn’t really seem to vibe with Jean-Claude Van Damme, who plays an ex-soldier embroiled in a “Most Dangerous Game”-style human-hunting scheme. Van Damme has the physical grace of a classic Woo protagonist without the soulfulness; he comes across as weirdly aloof. But by the time the movie arrives at its vaguely low-rent forest-and-warehouse climax, it becomes a no-fuss, all-muss extravaganza of Woo choreography. Viewed as a follow-up to Hard Boiled, it’s lacking, but whatever it loses in emotion and humor, however, it gains in propulsive, pulpy glee.
Silent Night’s cut corners, like the weird judder on some of the digital camera moves, are less endearing. The movie is more blunt-force than balletic, which makes it entertaining in the moment and a little hollow when it aims to depict genuine, soul-rending loss. The John Wick series owes Woo an obvious debt, yet the first one scales down far more effectively than this movie, which feels like a poor man’s version. Most bafflingly, the Christmas angle goes relatively unexploited; I’m not asking for cutesy Violent Night-style candy-cane killings, but it’s a little weird that a vengeful shoot-em-up set on Christmas Eve doesn’t get more decorative than some baubles hanging in the otherwise business-as-usual gangster lair. (Don’t any of these guys have families of their own who want them home for the holiday? That feels like a question Woo would happily answer in one of his richer movies.) Is the movie’s nastiness actually meant to critique an American culture that embraces Taken and its ilk? Even in that realm, Face/Off does it better, with a psychotic criminal at one point offering superior husband-and-father duties simply by cutting through the suburban piety.
It's not necessarily a problem that Silent Night, Hard Target, and Paycheck aren’t up to Woo’s best work. Seeing a filmmaker operating in odd or unworthy spaces can be one of the perverse pleasures of following a long-term career. But watching these minor entries in the Woo filmography, it becomes clear that he may never contort his sensibility to fit comfortably into these genre exercises, no matter how well-suited he might seem to the job. He’s too naturally expansive to be fenced in. It may be his most accidentally American quality.
