'Silent Night' Review: John Woo's Ultimate Lesson in Image and Sound-Making
John Woo strips away dialogue and delivers a no-holds-barred actioner that reminds us all why he’s one of action cinema’s greatest image-makers.
John Woo’s grand return to Hollywood fittingly contains no dialogues. After letting the guns do the talking for most of his pictures, he finally removes the protagonist’s voice in the opening moments of his latest actioner, ‘Silent Night’, as Brian Godlock (Joel Kinnaman) gets directly shot in the throat by a gang leader, Playa (Harold Torres) after one of his bullets hit and killed Brian’s son.
After recovering in the hospital, he spends his time at home drinking himself to death while his wife, Saya (Catalina Sandino Moreno), watches him in such sadness that she can’t bring herself to say anything. She ultimately leaves him as Brian can’t find a way to heal from the pain of his son’s loss, prompting him to go on a revenge-fueled quest to kill Playa and the gang members who caused the loss of his son, putting an end to what Detective Dennis Vassel (Scott Mescudi) should’ve done a year ago.
The first hour or so of Silent Night is Woo’s attempt at a dialogue-free drama, and its results are inconsistent. At times, he lets the images speak for themselves and creates a slew of dramatically poignant and striking visuals to draw audiences into a deeply tragic situation with Brian not seeing a way out of his massive grief. These moments are punctuated by effective transitions from one scene to the next and are the highlights of Silent Night’s dramatic portions.
Kinnaman is also excellent as Brian throughout the movie and showcases a dramatic side of himself that has never been fully realized until today. James Gunn began to explore his dramatic chops in The Suicide Squad, but it took Woo’s skills as a masterful visual and expressive artist to paint one who has been broken so much by his personal challenges that the only way he sees out is to exact revenge on the perpetrators responsible and join his son in the afterlife.
Woo mastered the art of micro-physiognomy through Nicolas Cage and John Travolta's faces in Face/Off by having the leads play each other instead of themselves. But that film had many [iconic] dialogues, whereas Silent Night wholly relies on the facial expressions and micro-movements of the actors’ faces and body language. Without it, the film automatically fails. Thankfully, Kinnaman is such a skillful facial performer that his expressions are always clearly conveyed to the audience, bringing a more emotionally complex and disturbed protagonist than it would’ve been with dialogue.
However, the pacing in its first half is interminably glacial, with Face/Off-esque flashbacks that feel so ridiculous they strip the core human drama that would normally make this tragic situation difficult to watch. Woo loves to bathe his flashbacks with as much lyrical photography as possible to make them feel dreamlike and joyous, but there’s too much of it that it reduces the drama to an exercise in dialogue-free filmmaking instead of being more active and engaging to the viewer. A couple of images where Brian believes he is seeing his son or his life flashing back before his eyes also fall flat as they’re badly inserted into the movie and reduce the impact of its dramatic core.
It’s only when Silent Night gets into its last hour, a carnage-fueled array of insane and mind-numbing action sequences, that Woo reminds us all why he’s one of action cinema’s most gifted and treasured image-makers. It’s got everything Woo fans love about the man, minus the doves, though that would’ve been the biggest continuity error in cinema history since doves can’t endure the Christmas cold. As “dialogue-free” as this movie has been marketed as, Woo has developed his own cinematic language and mode of communication throughout his illustrious career, from his mega-hit A Better Tomorrow to Mission: Impossible II.
Woo hasn’t also lost his hyper-stylized touch and always finds ways to refine his approach to gunfights and how they sound. Woo’s guns have a distinct sound that no other action filmmaker could ever recreate — here, the punctuated bangs sound more vicious, fitting with Brian’s gruff quest for vengeance. The man isn’t an action hero, and his style is more erratic and emotionally driven than anything else. Therefore, the guns don’t sound as perfected or as precise as in previous Woo films, with the camerawork also following suit.
It’s less polished and refined than his previous works, but that’s by design. The camera keeps rapidly panning from one area of the frame to the next, never knowing where to center, because Brian is all over the place. He’s never done this before, and as he’s trained and trained and trained to get to that point, he’s still a novice. Only rage fuels him to complete his quest to the bitter end, and based on the vicious violence audiences are subjected to for a good chunk of the film, it fits with how he now perceives the world following his son’s death. He wants to burn it all without a care left in the world.
It’s a shame that, because of its dialogue-free approach, the antagonists are reduced to one-note stereotypes, and the police detective who shows up near the climax for an unearned team-up doesn’t feel as exciting as it should. But even amidst flaws that stick out like a sore thumb, Woo’s image and soundmaking remain as clear-cut as ever. After the disastrous Paycheck, Woo left America to continue his filmmaking in China, where he brought to the world the underseen Red Cliff and The Crossing series and Manhunt on Netflix. With Silent Night, Woo works within the trappings of a Hollywood production to refine his action techniques and continue to propulse him at the top of the pantheon of one of the greatest action filmmakers who ever lived.