Violent Night

Grade: C+

There were three things I really liked about Violent Night (opening in theaters today) – one of which was the first scene. We meet Santa (David Harbour) at a bar in England on Christmas Eve. He is several beers in, and quite a few sheets to the wind. A mall Santa shows up and asks Harbour if he just got off work too. “I’m on break,” he replies. “You’re not driving, are ya?” – the bartender asks. “I steer a little bit, but the reindeer do most of the work,” Harbour’s Santa retorts. After having his bar tab settled for him by the kindly other Santa, Harbour hastily staggers out – followed by the bartender, protesting that he can’t go out that door. It leads to the roof. By the time she makes it up there, she sees him flying through the night sky on a sleigh with 8 reindeer. And then she gets projectile vomited on. I could have done without that part, but otherwise, this was my favorite scene.

In the midst of so many fake movie Santas, sitting on their thrones of lies, David Harbour plays the real deal in Violent Night. He would get along famously with Billy Bob Thornton’s Bad Santa – one of many off-the-shelf parts used to assemble this movie. Back in America, we meet a family as dysfunctional as they are wealthy. They are the Lightstones, led by Beverly D’Angelo as the tough cookie matriarch. At age 71, she has a deep smoky voice, looks like she’s had some work done, and I think she gets paid by the number of times she cusses on the phone in front of her grandchildren. Other faces I recognized include Alex Hassell (Ross from Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth) and Edi Patterson (the housekeeper from Knives Out), who has some of the film’s funnier moments.

On Christmas Eve night, a group of elite mercenaries descend on the Lightstone estate in an attempt to steal their fortune. John Leguizamo’s role here, as their leader, ironically feels like the kind of thing his washed-up actor character in The Menu would be doing now. This is an action comedy with lots of blood squirting, spurting, and seeping into the snow. The violence doesn’t land as well as it could have, because much of the fight choreography is so frenetic and dimly lit. And the fights seem to go on forever. I knew I’d had enough by the time we got to the climax, when I started thinking “One of you die already, please! Doesn’t matter who.” Roger Ebert coined the term Fallacy of the Talking Killer. Violent Night has plenty of Talking Killer and Hesitating Killer moments. So many problems would be solved if they’d have just pulled the trigger, instead of standing there yakking.

Composer Dominic Lewis’s score is quite clever in the way it uses the melodies of numerous Christmas songs, but plays with the chords behind the notes in creative unexpected ways. It’s possible that Violent Night might catch on, and become the next big holiday tradition/cult classic. It might be worth another viewing one day many years down the road, if I happen to catch it on TV – but it’s not a super-high priority. One more thing about the film that I enjoyed: finally we see some “Home Alone”-style booby traps that produce realistic results.

Grade: C+