Slay Ride
If you’ve ever wanted to smack a Santa and use Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa on all your greeting cards, we’ve got the holiday film for you.
Violent Night
Director: Tommy Wirkola • Writers: Pat Casey, Josh Miller
Starring: David Harbour, John Leguizamo, Beverly D’Angelo, Cam Gigandet, Edi Patterson, Alex Hassell, Leah Brady, Alexis Louder, Alexander Elliot, Mike Dopud
USA • 1hr 41mins
Opens Hong Kong December 1 • IIB
Grade: B-
Violent Night is exactly what you see in its trailer. No more, no less. It’s a Christmas movie for those who dislike the gaudiest holiday of them all, and who are not quite convinced Die Hard is a Christmas film. Which is an argument I am most definitely steering far, far, far away from. That being said, it’s also an actioner with an enormous kill count, proudly advertised as from the same production minds as Nobody and Bullet Train (as well as the less effective Kate). If seeing a jolly old chimney climber throw down with a bunch of mercenaries and get blood and human offal all over his fluffy white trim sounds like fun, then this is the movie for you.
Violent Night was also born from a long line of movies in which Xmas cheer is mangled and mutilated, just a few of which include Black Christmas (three times!), Krampus, Bad Santa, and the granddaddy of them all, which fell victim to the puritanical Reagan ’80s, Silent Night, Deadly Night. This time around the mangling comes courtesy of Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola. Wirkola luxuriates in finding dark humour and grains of uncomfortable truths amid the familiar. His breakout hit, the frozen Nazi zombie action-comedy (now that’s a genre mash-up) Dead Snow took great delight in reminding enlightened Norwegians they had to fight to get there. Last year’s The Trip was every “couple trying to reconnect on vacation” story ever, gone murderously, hilariously awry. All that goes in the Christmas pudding here, which is hot garbage if you’re not already on board, perfection if you are.
Many a Grinch’s fantasy
The premise is simple (duh). Santa Claus (Hellboy and Stranger Things’ David Harbour) is real, and he’s an embittered, tired old man who’s fed up with the lack of true appreciation and understanding of what Christmas means. He scoffs at the commercial nature of it all – he’d probably love all the malls here (and yeah, most places) done up with baubles and trees in October – and curses kids interested only in cash and video games. We meet Santa on a Christmas Eve work break, sitting at a bar getting as blotto as possible. But he hauls himself off his barstool and back on the sleigh, not long after landing on the roof of the Lightstone family compound. The Lightstones are stinking rich, and currently reigned over by foul-mouthed matriarch Gertrude (Beverly D’Angelo). She and her grown children Alva (Edi Patterson) and Jason (Alex Hassell, Cowboy Bebop), along with their significant others, bad actor Morgan Steele (Twilight’s Cam Gigandet) and unwilling visitor Linda (Alexis Louder, Copshop) are taken hostage by Scrooge (John Leguizamo, having a moment), who hates the holiday, hates the Lightstones, and wants the enormous stash of cash in the estate’s private vault. When Jason and Linda’s sweet-natured daughter Trudy (the blessedly anti-whiny/precocious Leah Brady) calls upon Santa for help, he answers with extreme prejudice.
Ho, ho, frakkin’ ho
Gotta have magic
Yes, the jokes and puns are groaners. Fair, many of them are low-hanging fruit, like Alva’s lunkhead husband and insufferable influencer son Bertrude – so named to suck up to mom. The gross-out opener could be a put-off. And true, Wirkola and editor Jim Page could have shaved 20 minutes off the run time by excising the hoo-haa about faith, family, and the sappy magic and “true meaning of Christmas” horseshit from the narrative to spit out a tight, nasty seasonal actioner. But they didn’t, and in truth if you expected the sentiment to be bypassed you haven’t seen enough Christmas movies. Feel free to head to Netflix for a crash course.
But there’s still a fair amount of entertaining lunacy in Violent Night, including Bertrude, Santa’s backstory, the glee with which Trudy goes full Home Alone on some of her captors, and the thieves goofy code names: Gingerbread, Candy Cane, Krampus, and Sugarplum. And yes. Many of the kills are creative, fully earning their lusty “Oooohs!”, all of which Wirkola shoots with kinetic aplomb. C’mon. It’s why you watch. Of course, without Harbour, who seems to have emerged out of nowhere in the last decade from favourite “That guy!” to intense leading man and his innate appeal it would fall flat. He manages to make the weary Santa sad and empathetic; you feel his little pleasures but totally buy him going badass. And hey, if nothing else Violent Night must be applauded for the best use ever of Bryan Adams’ saccharine “Christmas Time.” That is a Christmas miracle. — DEK