Violent Night (15)
***
Violent night, holy night, all is crass, all is dark. For eleven months of the year, that’s the title of a straight-to-streaming action movie, but at this most wonderful festive period, it becomes something rather smart and enticing.
Just like in the music biz, in the movies one Christmas hit and you're made for life. Elf, It's A Wonderful Life, The Muppet Christmas Carol, are hardy perennials, reliable earning streams for their respective Noddies and Mariahs. With its Father-Christmas-as-an-action-hero set-up, Violent Night's bid to join them is both calculated and demented.
There is a surface ingenuity to this mix of three Christmas classics: Bad Santa, Die Hard and Home Alone. Harbour is a disillusioned, cantankerous, potty-mouthed, drunk Santa Claus, who finds himself playing John McClane in a hostage situation after an obscenely rich family discover that their holiday catering staff are actually a ruthless criminal gang.
Santa starts to fight back using Kevin McCallister-style improvised, slapstick violence. This a film where you will wish Father Christmas had the decency to carry a gun. Instead, the action is a series of impalements and dismemberings. That title isn’t just a cheeky quip: director Tommy Wirkola goes all in trying to live up to that title with horror movie graphic violence.
It's junky and reductive but effective. The performances are strong, there are some funny lines and the action is often gruesomely inventive. It's such a potent idea that audiences will want to go along with it, even if the movie is only halfway decent. As long as they aren't put off by the violence, and on my screening they certainly weren’t, this could be a hit.
What turned me off the film was that that it delivers its gore and decapitations with all the standard Christmas mush. Santa is sickened by the joyless materialism of the holidays, but gets his spirit back because there is one little girl Trudy (Brady) who truly believes in him.
Over the film Trudy goes from innocent child to killing machine without, apparently, losing her sweet nature. Santa’s magic power is only as strong as people’s belief in him, so this is the standard American paean to the glories of blind faith and brutal self-sufficiency.
Sentimentality and sadism are a repellent mix and any child who enjoys this deserves to be put on the naughty list for eternity.
Directed by Tommy Wirkola: Starring David Harbour, John Leguizamo, Alex Hassell, Alexis Louder, Leah Brady, Cam Gigandet and Beverly D'Angelo. In cinemas. 112 mins.
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