Silent Night suffered from one of Lionsgate’s weak advertising pushes, contributing to a pitiful domestic gross of just over $8 million, but it’s one of the more exciting films from the end of 2023. It’s legendary director/producer John Woo’s first English-language – well, sort of – film in 20 years, and it’s the first widely distributed silent film I’m seeing since The Artist won Best Picture and then completely disappeared from the culture in 2011. There’s been some flirtation with this, as Mad Max: Fury Road, the king of modern action movies, announced both black and white and silent cuts for home media, but has only delivered on the Black and Chrome edition.

It’s possible I’m still the only one waiting for that silent version of Fury Road, but Silent Night is a decent consolation.

Las Palomas, Texas, Dec. 24, 2021, dusk- Brian Godlock (Joel Kinnaman, who also produces executively) runs through alleyways in an ugly Christmas sweater and a single jingle bell, his hands already covered in blood. His daughter has been killed by stray gunfire from a nearby gang dispute, and he catches the car the bullet flew from, but is beaten and shot in the throat. He survives, but is rendered mute, and Silent Night plays out with no dialogue – a modern silent film.

One year later to the day, armed to the teeth and educated on the local cartel’s structure and hideouts, Godlock marks Christmas Eve with a roaring rampage of revenge.

John Woo means action, and eventually, the action is here. The back half of Silent Night delivers all the bombastic, crazy action you could possibly want, crowned by a terrific stairwell tracking shot once Godlock gets to the cartel’s hideout. It’s less stylized than the traditional Woo flick, grimier and in line with the modern string of neo-noir action movies that feature real, brutal martial arts, but still a master class in action choreography and camerawork from cinematographer Sharone Meir and plenty of that signature Woo slow-motion, which is always exactly where you want it. We get a lot of nice, satisfying blood splatter and tons of realistic stuntwork.

Grant Armstrong’s production design is another major highlight as Godlock descends from decaying suburbs to dilapidated office complexes and eventually to the boss’ lair at the top of the tower. The soundscape follows the same path, marked by Christmas music, symbolic of the family life Godlock has lost, descending into the sound of city streets and eventually an evil dance party in the hideout. It runs less like Woo and more like The Raid: Redemption as directed by David Ayer, but with that silent conceit.

There’s a whole school of debate around what defines film as an art form, but one of the contenders is motion – “movie” is short for “motion picture,” after all, and kinetic, modern action is by far the genre best suited to explore storytelling through motion. Silent Night tells its bloody tale primarily with physical acting and plenty of screams, but sadly, it cheats way too often on its premise, dipping heavily on expositional headlines, radio chatter and even text message dialogue. There are better, in-conceit ways to express just about everything the film cheats on, especially the dissolution of Godlock’s marriage and especially for a movie set over the course of 2022, when all the film’s radio chatter about political turmoil could be replaced by something as simple as putting some background characters in masks or “Make America Great Again” hats.   

The action starts “eventually” because the training montage is so long it has to be considered the film’s main body, and Godlock’s rampage doesn’t really start until an hour in. It feels overlong for a training montage, but adds a lot to the film to see Godlock acquiring so many skills – he does bodyweight training, learns knifeplay on Youtube, learns gunplay, deathproofs a Mustang and learns stunt driving, does some amateur detective work – and, at first, being so bad at them. As he prepares for his rampage, we see him suiting up in great detail, all his layers of armor and where his weapons go. In addition to seeing him shot and lose his voice in the first scene, he takes a stab wound to the leg the night before the rampage and must limp through it.

It’s clear that this is a normal, very killable human being with heft to his physical and emotional suffering, and it adds so much to the film. Even John Wick, the contemporary icon of plausibly realistic action movies and a direct inspiration for Silent Night, gets his magical bulletproof dinner jacket and, though he still seems vulnerable, has quite a few “made of iron” moments in Chapter 4.

I find myself almost automatically comparing Silent Night to John Wick: Chapter 4, which ends on a full hour in which Wick fights seemingly the entire city of Paris among several other major action set pieces. The entire movie and many of its stunts clearly inspired by Wick or the Raid movies that came before it. Silent Night is a terrific effort with a lot of its own merits, but it just doesn’t hold up to other action movies coming out right now. I’d like to see more rampaging by volume in Silent Night’s 104 minutes. The still-recent and genre-defining Fury Road set the bar for action saturation very high, and Silent Night doesn’t quite clear it.

That’s a good thing! In a superhero-dominated media landscape, old-school muscle movies are coming back in a huge way, and the genre is suddenly healthy enough that I’m turning my nose up at a very solid film here. Exciting, action-packed titles like Monkey Man, Civil War, The Fall Guy and even a Fury Road prequel will ride into theaters in the spring.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.