David Harbour is Santa, a not-so-jolly killing machine, in darkly comedic Christmas thriller Violent Night. It’s not very gripping, Rory Doherty writes, but it’s unlikely to bore you senseless.
Violent Night, the home invasion action film starring David Harbour as Santa Claus, is for the most part completely excusable. It’s not very gripping, but it’s unlikely to bore you senseless. The characters are largely worthless, but the film introduces enough expendable players so you don’t spend too long with the really irritating ones. It’s not very funny, but it’s a Christmas movie where Santa swears and messes people up, and there’s enough of that in there. I could stop talking here and the review will have only confirmed what you already sort of knew about the film’s quality. But there’s more than a few details that make the film interesting.
Violent Night belongs to two recent strands of genre films. Dark, violent Christmas films have been around for decades, but they’re either tenuously related to Christmas (Die Hard) or more family-friendly in nature (Gremlins, Home Alone), and in recent years we’ve seen a notable uptick in horror/action Yuletide fare with a much meaner streak or darker edge. Krampus and Better Watch Out are prime examples, and compared to these, Violent Night falls short in tension and narrative ingenuity.
The other category to which Violent Night belongs is the ever-growing network of John Wick riffs, either from that action film’s creators or people mimicking its tightly choreographed, impactful violence. As the years have gone on and the Wick series shows no sign of stopping (with two separate spin-offs on their way), we’ve also seen Wick’s style of action in Birds of Prey, Atomic Blonde, Nobody, Day Shift, Bullet Train… the list goes on. There’s a wealth of incredibly talented stunt coordinators getting the chance to flex their skills in more senior creative roles, but it’s not just John Wick’s action that’s being mimicked—its acerbic humour and effervescent coolness is being replicated in diminishing returns by every subsequent action property. Enter Violent Night.
It’s worth noting that Violent Night’s action… isn’t particularly good. Granted, there are some excellent kills, flashes of slick camerawork in fights, and if you can excuse oceans of digital blood spurts, you’ll be rewarded with a handful of impressively gross practical effects. But too often the film insists on relentlessly cutting between shots in a fight, and the only reason some attacks feel impactful is because of the sound effects playing over clearly constructed choreography.
This leaves Violent Night in a bit of pickle; its creative team clearly come from a dark comedy background (its two writers, Pat Casey and Josh Miller, penned both Sonic the Hedgehog movies), although its director has more action experience with his self-aware Nazi zombie Dead Snow movies. But the Santa action, which does not truly kick off until a good length into the film, feels a little lagging and soft compared to the ultra-kinetic brawling we’ve come to expect from these kinds of films, despite the fact that the stunt coordinator and second unit director Jonathan Eusebio has an extensive and impressive stunt background. But it’s also not that funny either.
Too many characters, from our main separated couple’s piercingly shrill relatives to the comedically DOA henchmen, act like the only direction they received was to scream the underwhelming gags in the hopes that—miraculously—laughs will be found. There’s no payoff to a lot of painful characterisation too; a conceited teenage influencer nephew, who the film jokes in bafflingly poor taste has just received a sexual harassment suit, doesn’t do anything with his livestreams and hashtags to help save the day in the end. Even the family secrets that threaten to tear our mega-wealthy hostage family apart are bluntly simple, so there’s no opportunity to riff on tense family relations at Christmas in a heightened, dangerous setting. The cranked-up comedic nature of so many characters completely severs them from recognisable reality (this is a problem Krampus and Better Watch Out avoid). This makes Santa Claus—who should be the out-of-place fantastical character—the most fleshed-out, grounded character.
Still, it’s hard to fault the cast. David Harbour does the best he can with a one-note character: a gruff, disillusioned, belligerent Santa who needs to believe in himself more than he needs the goodwill of all mankind, even though the part would be much funnier with a visibly older actor. Beverly D’Angelo, a bonafide pro at these sorts of hijinks, delivers the right amount of spite and venom as the super-capitalist matriarch who’s being robbed by John Leguizamo, who apart from appearing in John Wick, also stars in another hostage thriller-comedy this year (The Menu)—basically, he knows what he’s doing.
Outside of Harbour, the film’s shining light is the relationship between Santa and Trudy, the young girl caught in the midst of the violence. Talking to her on a walkie-talkie, it’s affecting watching Santa sum up the courage to wade into battle—especially after we learn of his viking warrior backstory. Other than a sweet performance from Leah Brady, Trudy also sets up her version of Home Alone traps executed with blunt, gory consequences. It feels like a suitably realistic update of the booby-trapped Christmas home formula and gets the most consistent laughs of the film. But aside from its few glimmering moments, Violent Night doesn’t make a convincing case for its 112-minute runtime, or for it reappearing for subsequent seasonal viewings. You’re left not really sure if Violent Night was the best the filmmakers could do or a result of them not really trying. Either possibility is kind of depressing.
