admin 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.
